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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
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

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

# Preview the data
schools.head()
# ------------ Which NYC schools have the best math results? ------------
best_math_schools = (
    schools[schools["average_math"] >= 640]  # 80% of 800
    .loc[:, ["school_name", "average_math"]]
    .sort_values(by="average_math", ascending=False)
)
print(best_math_schools)

# Plotting the top math schools more clearly
plt.
# ------------ What are the top 10 performing schools based on the combined SAT scores? ------------

# Calculate combined SAT score
schools["total_SAT"] = (
    schools["average_math"] + 
    schools["average_reading"] + 
    schools["average_writing"]
)

# Get top 10 schools based on total SAT score
top_10_schools = (
    schools[["school_name", "total_SAT"]]
    .sort_values(by="total_SAT", ascending=False)
    .head(10)
)

print(top_10_schools)

# ------------ Which single borough has the largest standard deviation in the combined SAT score? ------------
largest_std_dev = (
    schools.groupby("borough")
    .agg(
        num_schools=("school_name", "count"),
        average_SAT=("total_SAT", "mean"),
        std_SAT=("total_SAT", "std")
    )
    .round(2)
    .reset_index()
    .sort_values("std_SAT", ascending=False)
    .head(1)
)

print(largest_std_dev)