Court stenographer typing test practice

How a stenographer skill test is usually built

There's no single national format. Each High Court, district judiciary or commission publishes its own scheme. Most stenographer tests, though, share a structure:

1. Dictation. An examiner reads a passage, usually in English (some courts also recruit Hindi or regional-language stenographers), at a set speed, and you take it down in shorthand.
2. Transcription. You type out what you took down, on a computer, within a fixed time.
3. Marking. Your transcript is compared with the passage, and errors are counted under the court's own rules.

Typist and clerk posts in courts often have a straight typing test instead: you copy a passage at a set speed. The speed, duration and error rules for both kinds of test are in the notification, and they vary a lot.

When you read your notice, find these before you plan any practice: the dictation speed and how long it lasts, the transcription time, whether transcription is typed on a computer or written by hand, the error allowance, the language of each post, and, for Hindi posts, the font or input method. Those six details decide what you should practise.

One real example

To show what a scheme can look like, here is how one court described it. The High Court of Madhya Pradesh's 2017 advertisement for departmental English Stenographer posts lists a shorthand dictation in English of 400 words, described as "dictation of 5 minutes and transcription-typing on computer in 30 minutes".

If the 400 words are read over those five minutes, that's dictation at 80 words a minute. Other courts, other years and other grades use different speeds and times. Don't treat this example as the rule for your recruitment; read your own notification.

How much typing speed transcription actually needs

Using the example above: 400 words in 30 minutes. As pure typing, that's slow, around 13 words a minute. The hard part is reading your own shorthand outlines, deciding what they say, and typing punctuated legal English at the same time.

Typing speed matters because it buys you time for everything else. Our English word list averages 5.08 letters a word, so with spaces a typical English word is about six keystrokes. Rough figures:

At 25 WPM, typing alone eats almost two-thirds of a 30-minute window, leaving little time to puzzle over an unclear outline or check the transcript. At 45 WPM you have nearly twenty minutes left. Legal passages use longer words than our list, so real times run higher. Treat the table as a guide to why typing speed matters here, not a promise.

Why this page uses punctuation

Court passages are full sentences with commas, full stops, semicolons, quotation marks, capitals and section numbers. Marking schemes commonly count punctuation and capitalisation mistakes, and a word typed with a wrong comma attached is a wrong word in our scoring too.

So the test here starts with punctuation on. For more realistic sentences, switch to quotes, which uses passages from classic books with all their punctuation. For numbers (case numbers, section numbers, dates), turn on numbers in the ribbon or use the numbers test.

Our net WPM counts only words typed completely correctly, and accuracy counts every wrong keypress even if you fix it. Courts use their own marking rules, which we don't reproduce. Our scoring is stricter in most respects, so treat a strong result here as a good sign and nothing more. The formulas are on the metrics page.

A practice routine for stenographer candidates

This page measures typing, not shorthand. Combine it with dictation practice.

• Build clean speed first. Run the 5-minute typing test and this page until you hold your target net WPM at 97% accuracy or better.
• Practise transcription for real. Record or find dictation at your exam speed, take it down, then type the transcript into a text editor on a timer the length of your exam's transcription window. Compare it with the original passage word by word.
• Train legal vocabulary. Words like "respondent", "petitioner", "aforesaid" and "adjournment" are long and easy to misspell under pressure. Type them until they're automatic.
• Watch capitals. Proper nouns, court names and the start of each sentence all need Shift, and a missed capital is a mistake in many marking schemes.
• Rehearse the full length. If your window is 30 or 40 minutes, do at least one full-length transcription a week; the 30-minute typing test builds the stamina for it.

For the bigger picture of government typing exams, read typing tests for government exams in India.

Hindi and regional-language posts

Some courts recruit Hindi stenographers or typists. If yours does, check the notification for the exact font and input method allowed. Our Hindi typing test needs Unicode Hindi (Inscript, Remington GAIL in Unicode or phonetic) set in your operating system. Kruti Dev, a legacy non-Unicode font that some recruitments have historically specified, won't match the test text; if your notice names it, practise in that font as well.