Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) Practice Test 2025 - Free CIA Practice Questions and Exam Prep Guide

The standard deviation is a statistical measure that quantifies the extent to which individual values in a dataset deviate from the mean of that dataset. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean, while a high standard deviation indicates a wider spread of values. Therefore, choosing the option that refers to the extent of spread of individual values around the mean accurately captures the essence of what standard deviation represents in terms of population variability.

In contrast, other options focus on different characteristics: one describes the asymmetry of a distribution, another pertains to sampling distributions and their tendency towards normality, and the last one addresses the estimation error regarding population parameters from sample data. While these concepts are important in statistics, they do not define standard deviation in the context of population variability, which is primarily about how data points are distributed around their average value.