From the course: Test Prep: GRE

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Standard deviation

Standard deviation

From the course: Test Prep: GRE

Start my 1-month free trial

Standard deviation

“

- [Voiceover] So the way that I think about standard deviation for the GRE is that it's the average distance from the mean. So let's say I have a set of data and it's one, two, three, four,and five. So if I calculate the mean of this set of data, the mean is going to be three. So the average is three. Now let's say I'm comparing it to another set of data. Another set of data is one, two, three, four, and 50. So I'm not going to calculate the mean of this second set, but I do know that this bottom set has a bigger standard deviation than the top set. And why? Because it has an outlier. There's going to be a skewed average distance from the mean, because this number is going to be pretty far to the right of the mean. So that's actually one of the things that we need to think about for standard deviation. I'm not going to tell you how to calculate it, 'cause it's extremely unlikely that the test will ask you to calculate it, but it will just give you some common sense about it. So we can…

Contents