Exam 2 / HW 7

Here is yesterday's exam. I will have them graded by Monday, possibly with grades on moodle over the weekend. I'll post here when they are ready.

Your next homework (#7) is to do the remaining two exam problems you didn't choose yesterday. Due tonight by midnight, but we'll go over the problems quickly in class today.

Draft of the cheat sheet

Find it here. It will not change much, unless I find typos or obvious omissions.

(Also, I am not happy with the script "I" that I'm using to designate light intensity, as it looks too much like a "J". It will probably bother me enough that I will have to fix it.)

Today's lab

ac circuits.

HW5 solutions

A solution set to HW5 is out, though the solutions to the last couple of problems are a bit terse.

Quiz 5 & 6 solutions

Quizzes 5 & 6, along with their solutions, are now up.

Quiz tomorrow (Wed)

Reminder, there is a short quiz tomorrow on ac circuits. Basically, filters, entirely qualitative.

Checking grades online

I now finally have the system set up so you can log in and see your grades.

1) go here: http://faculty.mint.ua.edu/~pleclair/moodle/
2) Click on "PH102 Summer 2010" (for both sections)
3) Then, to log in to the system:

• Your username is same as your bama email address
• Thus, if your bama email is "jdingus@bama.ua.edu" your username is "jdingus"
• If you have a @crimson 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 PH102 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 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.

Any feedback you have on this system is helpful. Let me know if it works ... Right now, the first five quizzes, the first four homework sets, and your exam 1 scores are there. (Please check to make sure that is true ...) One homework and one quiz are being dropped from the listed average, as per the syllabus. The overall course grade is, for the moment, meaningless since I did not put in the proper percentages for each category. I'll do this soon.

If you are missing a grade, it means I didn't get it. Let me know if this is in error. Similarly, check that your scores in Moodle correspond to what you were handed back. Lab grades will appear there once the TAs send them to me ...

Online grades

I swear, I was getting ready to post grades online, and the power outage this evening brought down the server I need ... it should be up by 08:00 Tuesday, so Tuesday evening I can finish the update. I have graded all quizzes and all but the last HW set, which you'll get back tomorrow, but you'll have to wait one more day before I get grades online.

Hopefully Tuesday evening you will be able to log in to the open-source system I have set up to access all your grades. The server I have the software on did not power cycle well, so I can't finish uploading your grades to it until someone physically reboots it Tuesday morning.

(FYI, it is a secure system that you log in to, and I will post instructions on how to access it and determine your login and password. It is, in my opinion, less clunky than eLearning, and vastly easier from my end.)

It figures that I delayed one more day and this happened ... there is a lesson in there somewhere about procrastinating I guess.

Exam II this Thursday

Exam II is this Thursday. Same as last time, it will be held during the lab period, and we will have a lecture that day as well. The format will be nominally identical: you can skip 2 of the problems, you can bring a formula sheet, there won't be any multiple choice. I'll provide the basic formulas, also like last time. Basically, same thing, different material.

For the material, here's what it looks like:

Covered on exam II

• Book Ch. 18 (notes Ch. 5): end of dc circuits (combining resistors, multiple loops)
• Book Ch. 19 (notes Ch. 6) Magnetism (nothing on Ampere's law or the relativity stuff)
• Book Ch. 20 (notes Ch. 7) Induction
• Book Ch. 21 (notes Ch. 8) ac circuits (filters and audio circuits, basically)
• Book Ch. 21 (notes Ch. 8) EM waves (very little there, honestly.)
• Book Ch. 22 (notes Ch. 9) reflection / refraction (mirrors, refraction; no lenses)

The questions will be a bit heavier on circuits, magnetism, and induction (maybe 2 questions each) with not so much on EM waves or the start of optics (maybe 1 question each). More details to follow as the week proceeds ...

I will not make this exam purposely more difficult than the last one. However, most people find this material harder than the material from the first exam, in my experience. If you study the old homework & exam questions, you will probably be fine (presuming you've kept up with reading the notes or textbook).

Friday's homework

If you sent me homework by email on Friday, I'll send you a confirmation this evening. I got a bit behind this weekend.

Another day in the kingdom of fear

I'm glad we're still letting you do real, live labs with real, live equipment. Unlike these geology students, who can't have real rocks ...

(Or, heaven forbid, you try to find a chemistry set anymore. Sigh.)

So, even if you don't particularly like the labs, you can consider it something of a privilege to be allowed to do them anymore ;-)

Next homework

HW 6 is out, due Tuesday night. We'll go over some of them in class Monday, and the rest on Tuesday.

Monday

I've been a little bit ill this weekend, and have fallen behind ...

Monday (tomorrow) there will be a short quiz on induction (Friday's lecture) with an related lab.

Tuesday night, you'll have a homework set due, it should come out later tonight or early Monday morning.