PH253: online grades

I now finally have the system set up so you can log in and see your grades (HW1-3 and Exam 1 right now). Since I am still young enough to be idealistic, I'm using an open source system called Moodle. Apparently you still have to pay if you want a sensible name. Instructions below the jump ...




1) Go here: http://faculty.mint.ua.edu/~pleclair/moodle/
2) Click on "Introduction to Modern Physics Fall 2010"
3) Then, to log in to the system:

• Your username derived from your bama/crimson email address
• If your official email is "jdingus@crimson.ua.edu" your username is "jdingus".
• If you have a @bama address, perform the analogous string operation.
• Your password is the last four digits of your CWID. You can change the password if you like after logging in. In fact, this is an awesome idea. Please change it right away.

Once you have logged in successfully, you should be at the main PH253 course page. There are a great number of things on this page, most of them are not useful. I'm really only using this thing so you can view your grades. Facebook, blogger, email, and IM handle the rest well enough.

From this main page, you can access your grades. You should see a link for "Grades" on the left-hand side of the page, about halfway down, under "Administration." For that matter, you can change your profile, create a little blog or discussion board, or all sorts of other things. All your information is safe - no one else can see your grades/email/etc. The data is stored in an encrypted file on a secure server.

Any feedback you have on this system is helpful. Let me know if it works ... Right now, the first three homework sets and your exam scores are there. (Please check to make sure that is true ...)

Finally: details on how the exam scores were calculated will be posted shortly, I have scaled the exam a bit. Basically, the scaling adds up to 15 points to your exam, based on your score relative to the mean.