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()
# Finding schools with the best math scores
# Filtering the data
best_math_schools = schools[schools['average_math'] >= 640][['school_name', 'average_math']].sort_values(by='average_math', ascending=False)
# Preview the data
best_math_schools.head()
# Identifying the top 10 performing schools
# Creating a column for average scores
schools['total_SAT'] = schools['average_math'] + schools['average_reading'] + schools['average_writing']
# Sorting and limiting the data
top_10_schools = schools[['school_name', 'total_SAT']].sort_values(by='total_SAT', ascending=False).head(10)
# Preview the data
top_10_schools[['school_name', 'total_SAT']]
# Locating the NYC borough with the largest standard deviation in SAT performance
# Grouping the data by borough
borough = schools.groupby('borough')['total_SAT'].agg(['count', 'mean', 'std']).round(2).reset_index()
# Filtering for the largest standard deviation
largest_std_dev = borough[borough['std'] == borough['std'].max()]
# Renaming columns
largest_std_dev = largest_std_dev.rename(columns={'count':'num_schools', 'mean':'average_SAT', 'std':'std_SAT'})
# Preview the data
largest_std_dev