Okay

welcome to today's SMEI lecture.

A couple of things.

If I look at the numbers, there's 250 students enrolled for the exam.

Just checked, 203 students enrolled in Aliyah.

60 today in the quiz.

That's kind of low average,

but Christmas is near.

Nine students in the course.

Now, so this is,

I'm assuming your goal is not just to learn something in this course.

I'm mostly probably

talking to the Zoomies because everybody who's in this room

the people in this group

are typically are doing something wrong and I'm not talking

I'm not preaching to the choir

or I hope I'm not.

Anyone not enrolled here is typically having a problem because they're

not taking advantage of what they could be.

In particular, the thing that's worrying me

is this big drop because quizzes actually help you somehow keep abreast with the topics and not

fall behind.

The kind of missing 200 or 140 or whatever you think of this number,

they are taking the risk that learning over February and March is much better for some

mysterious reason than learning over winter.

I can assure you that assumption is extremely shaky.

It's not borne out by any data we have.

Usually 90% of students profit from being in the course

in person.

As a general average, there are variations over the particular courses.

But

this is kind of the opposite around.

I can understand that you don't want to get onto the

bus and get back in dark, but learning-wise, it typically pays off.

Okay, end of rant.

I just

want you to kind of compare these numbers to actually the goal.

And I'm assuming that the

goal of 100% of these 250 people who are in

who have registered for the exam is to actually

pass the exam.

Somewhere there's a problem.

Okay, that being said, are there any questions

about SML?

Remember, I'm talking about SML as a special purpose programming language for dealing

with symbolic structures.

And I'm assuming that many of you are still or already hating SML and

thinking why, oh, why can't we just do Python?

The answer is it's a bit of an investment, but it'll

pay off later for the programming loads that symbolic data or symbolic representations actually