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                             What's the Story?
I recently completed the Data Science Immersive course from General Assembly.  For our first project, we were given data that broke down the scores and participation rates of SAT's and ACT's by state. The SAT and the ACT are the most popular college admission tests.

The assignment was to analyze the data and make a presentation to an (imaginary) audience of people from the company that provides the SAT. The SAT and the ACT are published by two different companies that compete for market share. Since the data included participation rates, my first thought was to make a presentation with suggestions as to how to increase market share in the states where where the ACT is outpacing the SAT.

I kicked off my analysis by generating a heat map of the correlations between each of the variables.
I show it below.

   

  Look at the SAT_M (math) on the x-axis and ACT_M on the y-axis. The heatmap has a blue
square where they meet on the plot. The legend indicates 'blue' is a negative correlation. This implies that students who do well on the SAT_M will do poorly on the ACT_M and vice-versa. Something is wrong here. Maybe I can use this data to tell a story that is not tied to market share. To see my analysis, click here.

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