State what the standard deviation measures.

Mark scheme

Marking points from the official mark scheme (May/June 2019). The mark or mark type is shown in brackets.

1. [1] Variation/ spread / dispersion of scores around the mean;
2. It shows how different the participants' scores were from each other;
3. [1] The standard deviation takes every score into account;
4. [1] So is less influenced by outliers;
5. [1] The standard deviation gives a representative measure (of the variation / whole groups' scores);
6. [1] It is better than the range which only includes the largest and smallest scores;