How can I sort 2 parallel lists in the same way?

[Borden]

Ok,so I have 2 lists with the same lenght.The one has etc. names of students and the other has how many courses a student has passed and these lists ara parallel.I want to sort out the second list so I can find the most courses passed by a student,but how can the first list be sorted in the same way so the right student is shown?Can I use the "sort" method in some way or I have to do a whole different proccess?

Thank you in advance.

[bvdet]

Following are a couple of ways:

>>> names = ["Bill", "Jane", "Harrold", "Nancy"]
>>> courses_passed = [12, 6, 14, 19]
>>> names = ["Bill", "Jane", "Harold", "Nancy"]
>>> courses_passed = [12, 6, 14, 19]
>>> combined = zip(names, courses_passed)
>>> combined
[('Bill', 12), ('Jane', 6), ('Harold', 14), ('Nancy', 19)]
>>> combined.sort(lambda x,y: cmp(x[1], -y[1]))
>>> combined
[('Nancy', 19), ('Harold', 14), ('Bill', 12), ('Jane', 6)]
>>> print "%s passed %s courses" % (combined[0])
Nancy passed 19 courses
>>> most = max(courses_passed)
>>> names[courses_passed.index(most)]
'Nancy'
>>>

[Borden]

Thanks,that was perfect!