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
print(schools.head(3))
# QUESTION = Which NYC schools have the best math results?
# Sort the schools by average_math in descending order and get the school names
df = pd.DataFrame(schools)
best_math_schools = df[df["average_math"] >= 0.8 * 800]
best_math_schools = best_math_schools[["school_name", "average_math"]].sort_values(by="average_math", ascending=False)
#NYC schools that have the best math results
print(best_math_schools)
# QUESTION = What are the top 7 performing schools based on the combined SAT scores?
# Sum across colums to get the total SAT scores
schools["total_SAT"]= df[["average_math","average_reading","average_writing"]].sum(axis=1)
# Top 7 Schools
top_10_schools = schools[["school_name", "total_SAT"]].sort_values(by="total_SAT", ascending=False).head(7)
print(top_7_schools)
#QUESTION = Which single borough has the largest standard deviation in the combined SAT score?
# Group by borough and calculate the standard deviation of total_SAT
grouped = df.groupby("borough").agg(
num_schools=("school_name", "count"),
average_SAT=("total_SAT", "mean"),
std_SAT=("total_SAT", "std")
).reset_index()
# Get borough with highest standard deviation in total_SAT
largest_std_dev = grouped.sort_values(by="std_SAT", ascending=False).round(2).head(1).reset_index(drop=True)
print(largest_std_dev)