Skip to content

Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash.

Every year, American high school students take SATs, which are standardized tests intended to measure literacy, numeracy, and writing skills. There are three sections - reading, math, and writing, each with a maximum score of 800 points. These tests are extremely important for students and colleges, as they play a pivotal role in the admissions process.

Analyzing the performance of schools is important for a variety of stakeholders, including policy and education professionals, researchers, government, and even parents considering which school their children should attend.

You have been provided with a dataset called schools.csv, which is previewed below.

You have been tasked with answering three key questions about New York City (NYC) public school SAT performance.

# Re-run this cell 
import pandas as pd

# Read in the data
schools = pd.read_csv("schools.csv")

# Preview the data
schools.head()

# Start coding here...
# Add as many cells as you like...
#subset schools to find the schools with math score of at least 80% of the maximum possible score of 800
min_score_80_percent = 0.8 * 800
best_math_schools = schools[schools.average_math >= min_score_80_percent]
#sort the dataframe by average_math score in descending order
best_math_schools = best_math_schools.sort_values(by='average_math', ascending=False)
#extract the school_name and average_math columns
best_math_schools = best_math_schools[['school_name', 'average_math']]

print(best_math_schools)
#create a new column 'total_SAT' to calculate the average total scores for each school
schools['total_SAT'] = schools.average_reading + schools.average_math + schools.average_writing
#sort the schools dataframe by total_SAT in descending order
schools_sorted = schools.sort_values(by='total_SAT', ascending=False)
#extract the school_name and total_SAT columns
top_schools = schools_sorted[['school_name','total_SAT']]
#get only the top 10 schools by total_SAT
top_10_schools = top_schools.head(10)

print(top_10_schools)
#group the schools data by borough and return the borough with the highest total_SAT standard deviation, along with its mean and the number of schools in the borough
grouped_df = schools.groupby('borough').agg({
    'school_name':'count',
    'total_SAT':['mean', 'std']
}).round(2)
grouped_df.columns = ['num_schools', 'average_SAT', 'std_SAT']

largest_std_dev = grouped_df.sort_values(by='std_SAT', ascending=False).head(1)
print(largest_std_dev)