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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
schools_math_scores = schools[['school_name','average_math']]
# Filter by math score at leat 80% of Max=800
best_math_schools = schools_math_scores[schools_math_scores['average_math'] > (0.8*800)]
# Sort by score
best_math_schools.sort_values(by='average_math', ascending=False, inplace=True)
# Which NYC schools have the best math results?
print( best_math_schools )# Identifying the top 10 performing schools
# Create column for scores: total_SAT
schools['total_SAT'] = schools[['average_math', 'average_reading', 'average_writing']].sum(axis=1)
# Sorting and limiting the data
schools_SAT_scores = schools[['school_name','total_SAT']]
top_10_schools = schools_SAT_scores.sort_values(by='total_SAT', ascending=False).head(10)
# What are the top 10 performing schools based on the combined SAT scores?
top_10_schools.head(10)# Locating the NYC borough with the largest standard deviation in SAT performance
grouped_boroughs = schools.groupby('borough').agg(
num_schools=('total_SAT', 'size'), # Count of schools
average_SAT=('total_SAT', 'mean'), # Average total_SAT
std_SAT=('total_SAT', 'std') # Standard deviation of total_SAT
)
grouped_boroughs = grouped_boroughs.round(2)
print(grouped_boroughs)# Which single borough has the largest standard deviation in the combined SAT score?
largest_std_dev = grouped_boroughs.sort_values(by='std_SAT', ascending=False).head(1)
print( largest_std_dev )