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.
I worked with a dataset called schools.csv, which is previewed below and answered 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()schools.info()percent_tested column has 20 null values. based on the given analysis tasks, this column is not relevant to our analysis and can be either deleted or left as it is.
schools.describe()Q1) Which NYC schools have the best math results?
best_math_schools = schools[['school_name',
'average_math']].sort_values('average_math', ascending=False)
best_math_schools = best_math_schools[best_math_schools['average_math']>=0.8*800]
print(best_math_schools)Stuyvesant High School has the highest 'average_math' score
Q2) What are the top 10 performing schools based on the combined SAT scores?
top_10_schools = schools
top_10_schools['total_SAT'] = top_10_schools['average_math'] + top_10_schools['average_reading'] + top_10_schools['average_writing']
top_10_schools = top_10_schools[['school_name','total_SAT']]
top_10_schools = top_10_schools.sort_values('total_SAT',ascending=False).head(10)
print(top_10_schools)once again Stuyvesant High School had the highest score
Which single borough has the largest standard deviation in the combined SAT score?
largest_std_dev = schools.groupby('borough')['total_SAT'].agg(['count','mean','std'])
largest_std_dev = largest_std_dev.round(2).sort_values('std', ascending = False)
largest_std_dev.columns = ['num_schools','average_SAT','std_SAT']
largest_std_dev = largest_std_dev.head(1)
largest_std_dev
Manhattan has the largest std dev in combined SAT score