Map letters to numbers, map words to a “score” (presumably defined by the sum of numbers from the per-letter mapping), find the highest-scoring word.

I actually like this one a lot as a set of loop exercises. It’s sort of a couple compound ones. Solution is “merely” an exercise in being fluent in loop writing. It’s a very nice junior test, I think.

def high(x):
    score_map = {}
    for i, letter in enumerate("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"):
        score_map[letter] = i + 1
    def score(w):
        return sum([score_map[c] for c in w])
    words = x.split(' ')
    
    maxScore = 0
    maxWord = ""
    
    for w in words:
        if score(w) > maxScore:
            maxScore = score(w)
            maxWord = w
            
    return maxWord

Strings are a popular topic for practice interviews for newcomers to the field. I list the string questions here.