4. It is important to remember that the standard deviation in most cases is not exactly the average amount that scores differ from the mean. To be precise, the standard deviation is the square root of the average of scores’ squared deviations from the mean. This squaring, averaging, and then taking the square root can give a slightly different result from simply averaging the scores’ deviations from the mean. Still, the result of this approach has technical advantages that outweigh the slight disadvantage of giving only an approximate description of the average variation from the mean.