Data Analysis on the GRE

GRE Quantitative · Axiom Academy

15–20% of Quant — and the one habit that decides whether a single number tells you the truth about a data set, or hides it. 15–20% of Quant, and it starts with a trick question Data Analysis covers roughly 15–20% of the GRE Quantitative Reasoning section. Unlike geometry, there's no shape to recognize — you're reading tables, charts, and short data sets, then reasoning about what the numbers actually say. Statistics, chart-reading, probability, counting, and distributions all come back to one question: what does this data set really look like? Watch six typical data points settle on the number line below — the mean and median markers land on top of each other, like you'd expect. Then one outlier arrives. Watch what happens to the mean. One outlier pulled the mean from 40k up to 64.3k — a 24k swing — while the median didn't move at all. Neither number is "wrong." They're just answering different questions, which is exactly what this unit teaches you to tell apart. Five topic areas, all reasoning about the same data Every GRE data-analysis question draws from one of these five areas — and a single "data set" question often blends two or three of them at once. Mean, median, mode, and range describe where a data set is centered; standard deviation and variance describe how spread out it is; quartiles and percentiles locate a value within the whole set.

This is the written version of the interactive lesson above. See the full GRE Quantitative course.