 Hello, learners. I'm Imma Borrella, and I'm your course lead for SC0x. I'm delighted to be here today with you in this first-life event for SC0x, Supply Chain Analytics. Here accompanying me is Samantha Barney, and she's a Marketing and Communications Officer for the MicroMasters. So thank you for being here, Samantha. Yeah, thanks for having me. So I work with SC0x, Imma on the Marketing and Emails, hopefully you get from me, working with Arthur Grau. And I will be on chat if you have any questions that come up in the YouTube. Feel free to pick me. Great, so let's get started. And first of all, I would like to set up the expectations for the life event. We prepared an agenda. So this is the contents we're going to cover based on the requests for many learners. Should we switch to this slide? Sorry, just so that. I mean, the agenda is not back. Okay. So then, so this is the agenda. We will start talking a little bit about SC0x because as you all know, because you've been in the course for a while, we have a new format. And for some people, it's hard to self-regulate or to organize in a way that they can be ready for the final exam. So we will give you some advice. Then we will talk about the SC0x final exam because it's a protein. And of course, people want to know more about it. We've received a lot of requests from learners in the forums and in the email. So we will clarify all the points that you need to know about the final exam. And finally, we will dive into a topic that is probability. And particularly, we will answer questions about the problem that we shared in the exam prep section. But we will also help you to develop some intuition by thinking about probability distributions graphically. So that's what we're going to be doing today in the next 20, 30 minutes and hope you enjoy. And please reach out to us through the chat because this is a live event and we really want to interact with you. So regarding the SC0x contents and pace, we have five modules in SC0x. But what it's very important for you to know if you're still in modules one or two is that not every module is equally long or equally intense, let's say. So module ones and two are the contents are shorter and less the quantity of concepts being taught are not as many. While in module three and four and five are more intense are longer modules and you should be ready to allocate enough time to cover all these contents before the final exam. That's why we prepare this graph on the left where we try to communicate what's the weight in time or effort. This is an estimation, of course, but what's the weight of each module in the total time that you should be allocating to the course. So of course, this will depend on your background and how much you know about the different topics because maybe you know already a lot about statistics, then you could fly through module three. But if you are new to all the topics, just please take this into account. Not all the modules have the same weight have the same sorry have the same weight in time and effort. And on the right side of your screen, you can see the time we have left until the exam. So today is May 9 and we have six weeks left before the final exam opens. So please just looking at these two graphs just think about your background and like how much you have completed already in the course and plan accordingly so you don't have unpleasant surprises one week before the exam. Great. I guess we do have one question is for the effort of students that are enrolled or verified just in the last few weeks. Do you have any recommendations for preparing or catching up based on your model. Yeah, so they should really hurry, hurry up and if they are committed and they dedicate enough hours every week, they can still make it. We estimate and this is a rough estimate but we estimate that people dedicate average 100 hours per course to cover all the contents. So if they think they can allocate that amount around that amount of hours in the coming weeks, then they could definitely make it. Great. So now let's dive into the final exam because I know like this is what worries you the most. First of all, regarding eligibility only verify learners can take the final exam. So if you are planning on taking the final exam you have to be verified. Of course this life events is open only to verify learners, but you have colleagues who are thinking like they want the certificate and are taking the course and are not verified yet. Just let them know that they need to verify if they want to access the final exam. The verification deadline is on May 29. Then regarding the grade, the final exam accounts for 100% of the course grades. There's no other exercise that is graded during the course. So it's all in this one shot in the final exam. The score to pass the course should be 60% or above. So not 58, not 59, actually 60. The exam will be opened during one week. It opens on Wednesday, June 19 at 1500 UTC and closes on Wednesday, June 26 at 1500 UTC. So what does this mean so that the exam is available during all that period, but and you can choose which time to take it in that period. Of course you can start on Wednesday, June 26 at 1500 UTC. At that time the exam closes. So plan accordingly because you want to have enough time to complete the exam. Once you start the exam, it is a timed exam, so you will have four hours to complete it. Once you click the start of my exam button, a clock will appear in your screen and the countdown from four hours will start until zero. So you need to complete and submit all the problems before the end of the of the time, the end of the time, the end of the four hours. This should be more than enough time to complete the problems. We designed the problems so you can actually complete the whole exam in like shorter times. So these four hours will allow you to review some of the problems to and some of the answers. Regarding the exam contents, you will find four problems in the exam. These problems will cover contents from modules one to five. So it will be a comprehensive exam for the whole course. And you can expect a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions in each problem. So in each problem you can have like some numerical questions where you have to calculate something or some qualitative questions where you have to reason and select among different options in a multiple choice question. Those are the two types that you're most likely will find in the province. And something that is very important and that some some people complain about, but this is the way our rigorous exams are made because rigorosity is very, very important for us to provide a MITX certificate to people. We need to make sure that they like really learn the concepts and are able to complete the problems. So in order to do so we only provide two attempts per question. And no feedback. We will provide no feedback about if your answers are right or wrong. So no green or red checks. You just will see that your answer has been submitted. And that's all. So please keep that in mind. Because this is different from the problems that you've been solving in the course. In the course you see you get this feedback. You can see if the answer is right or wrong. But in the exam would you want to be able to see this. So it's like a real exam in a in person setting in that sense. So one question that did come up about the final exam is just looking at the feedback after the exam is done. Any sort of items that come up that they'll be able to see their questions, where they got wrong or the feedback or the actual correct answers just in case they want to take in another time and study a little bit harder. Yes, so we haven't done that in the past, but we are considering to start doing it. So the C1X, other of our courses in MicroMasters, we started providing feedback after the exams just because of this reason. Because if people don't know where they got wrong they can't learn accordingly. So even if the exam is a pure assessment exercise, we are considering to provide this feedback. So we will get a confirmation, official confirmation soon. Perfect. So if you have any more questions, just let's use the chat on the right of your screen, on the right of our faces, or no actually it's in the left. It's on the right. No, we are the other way around, it's like a mirror. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to the presentation now. And because I prepared a slide to recommend you how or to suggest you how you can prepare for the exam. So, I don't know if you're aware of this, but in each module you have a section that is called test your knowledge. It's actually like a mini exam for the module. It's not graded, it's just some exercises, but they're comprehensive exercises that will help you assess if you have learned enough or you have assimilated the concepts that you should assimilate in that module. So I strongly recommend you, after you finish reviewing a module, to take this test your knowledge section and see how well or bad you perform in it. If you perform well, you could consider that you are ready to go forward, if your performance is not so good, then consider reviewing the concepts. And of course, checking also the responses or the solutions to those problems so you understand where you are making mistakes. So this test your knowledge sections are really good tools to prepare for the exam. Besides, we are now offering, since last week, the exam prep section. So, what we are doing here is to solve problems from previous exams. This of course is always very helpful because it will give you an idea what's the level of difficulty and also the type of problems that you will find in the exams. Of course then in the exam you can find a problem that is a little bit more challenging or a little bit easier than the ones we solve because each exam is different. But you will get a little bit of an idea of the flavor of the exam. And what we are going to offer you, because we know it's hard to prepare for an exam. And also people get very nervous because of course you've been preparing for a long time and you only have this one shot to pass the course. That is the final exam. So we want to reduce the stress a little bit by providing a practice exam. This practice exam, we will open it one week before the final and it will be a timed exam. It will replicate the same environment that you will find in the final exam. So by taking this practice exam, you can really like get the feeling of taking the exam itself. And then when you take the exam you know like how it works. So that's why we are going to be offering this. And more information will be coming soon about the practice exam. Down here in the screen you can see an estimation of the next life events. Also when we'll open the practice exam and when the real exam will be. So the next weeks will be pretty busy. We will confirm all the dates. In the coming weeks. But keep this in mind so you have an idea of how can you prepare for the exam interacting with us at the same time. Great. So this was all about the course and the exam. And now let's talk a little bit more about the exam prep section. I hope you're all familiar with it. Now what we are going to do here is to solve problems from the exam, from past exams of SC0X. And we will be, since we have a limited time from now to the exam, we will be covering three main topics. The first one is going to be probability. The next one will be hypothesis testing. And then we will talk about linear program. But today we're going to be talking about probability. So if you go to the exam prep section, you will find already a problem there as a problem about probability distributions, a video with a step by step solution that I recorded last week. And the life events section that is part of what we are doing now, but also in the life events section, you will see a forum that is specifically for you to ask questions or to like propose topics that you want to be covered during the life events. So for this life event, we didn't get too many questions or comments, maybe because the platform was down this morning. Unfortunately, but for the upcoming life events, please use that forum to pose your questions or any doubt you have, anything you want us to cover during the life event. So we can prepare for it. So yes, so what I would like to do now, if there's no questions about the previous sections that we covered is to dive into the topic that we want to cover today. The topic is probability. And first of all, I would like to state the importance of probability distributions in the supply chain management area. Why is it important that we supply chain professionals know about probability, because the world is an uncertain place. So it's very hard to determine what's going to happen the next month in our supply chain with our demand with our inventory. It's hard. So probability is a tool that helps us to plan for it. It's very useful for characterizing demand. We can use it to approximate how the man is going to behave and then use it for plan in our supply chain. It will play a big, big part in inventory management, and you will see that in se 1x our next course in the micro masters. Particularly we use it a lot for the solve the news vendor problem is stochastic inventory management. And you will also use it in our micro masters for risk management and hopefully in real life too, but in the micro masters we use it to assess the probability of some risk happening and impacting our, our businesses. So it's a very important building block for for supply chains managers, and also for micro masters students. So it will be great that you get a good grasp of probability distributions. Of course, we know the probability sometimes is not so easy to understand for some people is really like not too intuitive. So we wanted to encourage you to use the sandboxes. We have sandboxes for many different concepts. The sandboxes are little widgets that help you play with the different concepts and better understand them in a more intuitive way. So if you go to the course to the course. I say that index, you will find the sandbox section in there and in the sandbox section, you will find one that is specific about probability distribution. If we go now to that to the course. Thank you, Sam. Okay, so this is what you will find if you go into the course into the sandbox area and click on the continuous distribution sandbox. Right. If you just open it, you won't see much. But here, if you click here, the recalculate an auto window, then the distribution will appear. So right now, this is a normal distribution with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. Do you remember in our problem we had the problem we solved about probability in the exam prep section, we had a normal distribution with a mean of 1266. And a standard deviation of 253. So we could actually replicate the distribution here graphically, I can recalculate an auto window too. And now I have the normal distribution for the values that I introduced that are the values in my problem. So how can this widget help us understand or think about the questions that they are asking us in the problem. So here, if we start moving this slider, we will see how the value X is moving and you see it here and also the cumulative area. So the area under the curve, the value is showing here. So if you keep moving, then you get here to the mean, more or less around the mean, 1300, then the cumulative area around the mean there should be around 0.5. Of course, these values are not super exact, because we don't want you to use this widget to solve the problems to we want you to use the exact calculation so you can calculate this in Excel. But here, this will help you understand what you are doing. So in the first question, if you remember, natural beauty, so the company in the problem decided to stock 1200 units. So let's go there, 1200, more or less around that. And the question of the problem was, if that's the level of stock, what is the probability that the demand during that month exceeds the stock level? So if the demand exceeds the stock level, that means that the demand will be higher than this value, right? This is my stock. So what if the demand is higher than this value? So what is the probability of my demand being higher than this value? Is this area that is color in yellow? No, it's actually this other area on the right of this value, of this line. So I could just make, okay, so then all this area is going to be one minus this area, because all the total area under this curve is going to be equal to one, as you know. So I could do one minus the cumulative area on the left, or I could just like check the right tail, and now what is colored is the probability of stocking out, the probability of the demand being higher than this value here, that is 1200. So as I said, this is inexact, because the correct answer is 60%, but close enough, and you can get an idea. This is good for thinking about it, if it helps you. You could also check other distribution types here. Let's go back to the slides. So that about the sandboxes. And this is the problem that you hopefully solved, that I solved step by step in a video that is available in the platform. And maybe if you have questions about the problem, something that you were struggling with, just let us know and we can ask them directly. If not, I will just highlight a few points from each question. So things you should be like aware of or really like looking for when you're solving these kind of problems. We do have some questions. Okay, so the list of I'm tired of hearing myself talk all the time. Okay, so see one big question is regarding the final, the test exam, how many times that the students will be able to actually try it. And if they will get feedback on the test, the prep. Yes, so that's a very good question. So I'm going to be what I would like for the exam prep to be is like not providing feedback at all in the prep itself, because that defeats the purpose I want you to feel like if you were in the real exam. So the settings will be exactly the same. It will be time to four hours, there will be four problems, you will receive no feedback, and you will have two attempts per question. However, I can provide you with the solutions afterwards, once you complete the, the prep exam, that makes total sense because this is to help you prepare. So yes, yes, I will do that. So another question is how many attempt, how many times can they try the prep exam. Yeah. Well, I haven't thought about that, but we could set it up so you can like try it a few times if you if you need to. That shouldn't be a problem. Okay, yeah. See if we have anything else that seems to be it for the most part we've answered most of the other questions which is great. Yeah. So should we continue we have five minutes left. So you have five minutes of opportunities to ask more questions. You have us here live. Okay, so one question did just come in. So available tools or software that they can use on the exam. Is it just items that they've used in the course itself or can they have access to other items. Great question. So you can use this an open book exam so you can use anything you want. You cannot collaborate with others. So you cannot use other people. That's, that's very, very important. If we found out that you have collaborated with other people outside of like yourself, then there will be consequences. Apart from that, if you don't collaborate with other people, you can use any software that you need or even if software that we haven't used in the course, that's totally fine for us. This is for the course exams, of course in the CFX the comprehensive final exam of the MicroMasters, the rules are different, but this is an open book exam so you can use anything you want. That's a very important point too. You cannot collaborate with others. I can't say it like enough times, and you cannot ask questions about the exam in the forums. So that's absolutely forbidden. It's a part of the honor code. If you check it in the first module of the course, the intro module. If you have any question about the final exam, or you have any problem while you're taking the final exam, you can send us an email directly to sc0xhelp.mit.edu. I will prepare anyway, I plan on preparing a section specifically about the exam and post it in the course. So all these things that we're sharing today will be crystal clear and you can consult them anytime. Perfect. Awesome. That seems to be, yeah, I think we've answered all the questions. Great. Good timing. So then maybe let's wrap up with an overview of the problem and just one key idea for each of the questions of this problem that is in the platform is already solved in a video there. I encourage you to go and try to solve it yourself then watch the video if you struggle with it to see how I solved it. And now I'll just provide some some tip on each question. Can we go to the slides again. Thank you so much. So the first one. Again, when you find a problem that is about probability, you really need to understand what's the probability distribution that we're using for each question because it might change from question to question and that's what happens in this problem. So the first one is normal distribution. We love the normal distribution because it's super helpful, super useful and it's applied in many, many different areas in supply chains. So the first one is about normal distribution. I already explained like how to think about it, even graphically with the widget that I that I was using a few minutes earlier, the sandboxes. So I will just jump to question to question to is a Poisson distribution as a product that whose which demand follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of six. And Poisson distributions are discrete probability distributions so they are not like normal distributions, they are a little different. They have like they can only take the random variable can only take unique numbers, discrete numbers, not a range, but discrete numbers. So they ask us, and I think this is a very, very interesting question, what is the probability of having sales. So they tell us, there's this product, and we might have sales but of course there's always some probability of having no sales. So how would I calculate that because I have to calculate the probability of sales being one, two, three, four, five, until 10 or can be any number right, never know. So the way to think about this is okay they're asking me the probability of having sales, that should be one minus the probability of not having sales at all. So first how you should think about this question because if you just try to calculate the probability of having like any other number of sales, or it's almost impossible right, but if you know that a total probability is one, then you just need to extract, subtract from one, the probability of having zero sales. And then about question three, question three, the problem says the product has a follows a triangle distribution. Remember the triangle distribution is a very interesting distribution because it's a tradition that we use when we don't have much data and we just have some estimates, we know, like, that we sell no more than a center number of items and no less than a certain number and we usually sell like another number of items. So we have like this maximum this minimum and then the most frequent value. When we have this kind of information that anyone can have on the top of their mind anyone working at a shop at least. When we have this kind of data, we can use a probability distribution to estimate the demand. So they ask us first what are the expected sales and the expected sales is the expected value and in for each distribution it's there's a formula that helps us calculate it. In this case is just the average of these three values, the maximum the minimum and the most frequent number. So it's really easy then the more trickier questions with the triangle distribution come when they give us a value and they ask us the probability of fulfilling the demand for example with a certain number of certain number of items in stock. Then we should be super careful to look where that value falls. If it's between A and C or between C and B so between the minimum and the most common value or between the most common value and the maximum value because depending where it falls, the, the cumulative density function that we'll use will be different. So just keep this in mind and because it's a very silly error but it can happen if you're like in a rush to do the through the completing the exam. Great. So, here we are we achieved our goal of finishing in 30 minutes. I don't know if we have any more questions. No other questions. The only big thing is that the next live event is scheduled for May 30. So we'll be sending out communications to all of you for problem number two. So keep an eye out for that. And the only other question that sort of came up is looking at basically tools to use for the exam. SAS as a tool if that's possible, and if they can use notes from this sort of live event as well as the things that you post. Yes, you can use any note, all the notes, all the slides, you can use SAS, you can use Excel, you could use other software, Google Spreadsheets if you like or anything really. So whatever is your preferred software, go for it and use your notes, use your slides. Just don't collaborate with others for the exam. Awesome. That's it. Great. So see you soon in three weeks for the next live event and you can make it. Awesome. Bye guys. Bye.