decimal places

kshuf

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Feb 9, 2014
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Is there a hard and fast rule about how many decimal places are to be used, at what point do we round off and such.

particularly for standard deviation?
 
Is there a hard and fast rule about how many decimal places are to be used, at what point do we round off and such.

Hello kshuf:

The short answer is "no".

Rounding to a specific number of decimal places has to do with precision.

There are different schools of thought regarding precision.

For example, scientists take great care not to introduce any greater precision in a result than data allow (look up the topic known as "significant figures").

On the other hand, many mathematics courses ignore significant figures (especially in word problems). In fact, some math exercises require rounding to a specific number of digits for no other reason than to check students' results for round-off errors during intermediate steps.

If you're enrolled in a course, I would suggest that you ask your instructor to explain how that particular course deals with this topic.

Cheers :cool:
 
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