Typing Speed Test

Practise for the typing test used in SSC, stenographer, court and bank clerical recruitment — marked the way boards mark it, on speed and error rate together.

Most online typing tests measure the wrong thing. They reward raw speed and ignore the mistake percentage, which is the figure that actually fails people.

How these tests are actually marked

A word means five characters including spaces. That is the standard definition, so “words per minute” has nothing to do with how many actual words you typed — it is your character count divided by five, divided by the minutes taken.

Speed alone does not pass you. Boards set a maximum mistake percentage, commonly five per cent and sometimes seven, and a candidate above it is failed however fast they typed. This is where most people lose the test, because practice tends to push speed up and accuracy down at the same time.

The usual standards

• SSC LDC and DEO, English — 35 words per minute
• SSC LDC and DEO, Hindi — 30 words per minute
• Stenographer Grade D — 40 words per minute on transcription
• Court and High Court clerical — usually 35 words per minute
• Bank clerical — usually 30 words per minute

Check your own notification. These vary between years, between states, and between posts within the same board.

How to practise so it transfers to the exam

1. Fix accuracy before speed. A candidate at 28 WPM with 2% errors is closer to passing than one at 40 WPM with 9%. Accuracy also improves faster with daily practice than speed does.
2. Practise for the full duration. Ten minutes is the usual exam length and the last three are where accuracy collapses. A minute-long test tells you almost nothing about that.
3. Do not look at your hands. If you currently do, expect your speed to drop for a fortnight before it rises past where it was. That fortnight is the whole investment.
4. Aim above the minimum. On the day you are on an unfamiliar keyboard, under time pressure, in a room full of people. Practising at exactly the required speed leaves no margin for that.
5. Practise every day rather than in long sessions. Twenty minutes daily beats two hours on a Sunday, because typing is motor memory.

On exam day

The keyboard will not be yours and may have a different layout or a stiffer action. Type a few lines before the test starts if you are allowed to. Read the passage for punctuation before you begin — capital letters, full stops and commas all count as characters, and a candidate who ignores them accumulates errors quickly. If you make a mistake, correct it rather than pressing on; an uncorrected error counts against you either way, and correcting keeps you aligned with the passage.

About the passages here

These are written in the register these exams actually use — official and general prose, ordinary punctuation, no unusual vocabulary or symbols. Practising on quotations and pangrams builds the wrong reflexes for a test made of long administrative sentences.