10 minute typing test

Ten minutes in Indian typing exams

Several recruitment boards in India time their typing skill tests at ten minutes. The figures below come from the boards' own instruction sheets. Boards revise their rules by notification, so check the notice for your exam before relying on any number.

The SSC sheet also expresses the requirement as key depressions per hour: 10,500 for English and 9,000 for Hindi. Over ten minutes that's 1,750 and 1,500 key depressions, which is exactly what 35 and 30 WPM give if you count five keystrokes per word. RRB instructions add that editing tools aren't allowed, and a separate RRB notice says a transcript under 300 words in English or 250 in Hindi isn't evaluated, which lines up with 30 and 25 WPM over ten minutes.

Our test is practice for the length and the stamina, not a copy of the exam. Exams use a set passage and their own error rules, set out in the instruction sheet; we use random common words and a strict net WPM that gives no credit to any word with an error. You may well score a little lower here than on the exam software for that reason, which makes this a cautious rehearsal. Exam-specific pages: SSC CHSL typing test, RRB NTPC typing test. For Hindi practice at the same length, use the Hindi 10-minute test.

The ten-minute targets in characters

Multiply WPM by 50 to get the characters you need in ten minutes.

The word estimates use the average word on our English 1,000-word list, 5.08 letters plus a space. Exam passages are prose with longer words and punctuation, so expect fewer words there for the same keystrokes.

Pacing a ten-minute run

Endurance tests punish a fast start more than they reward it. A plan that works for most people:

• Minutes 1 to 2: settle in about five WPM below your one-minute speed. You'll feel slow. That's fine.
• Minutes 3 to 7: hold that pace. Read one or two words ahead; the test shows three lines at a time without scrolling.
• Minutes 8 to 10: this is where errors creep in. Keep your speed and protect accuracy; a missed word now costs as much as it did at the start.

Over ten minutes each word you leave wrong only costs about 0.12 WPM, so a single slip isn't worth breaking rhythm for if you've already moved on. A ten-second pause, on the other hand, costs a full 1.7% of your test time, and the clock doesn't stop for it.

A 10-second time warning can be switched on in settings if you want a cue before the end. The test also keeps working offline once the page has loaded, so a dropped connection halfway through won't spoil the run.

Reading your result

Look at the chart before the number. A gentle downward slope across ten minutes is normal; a cliff in the last two or three minutes points to tiring hands or posture, and is worth fixing before an exam. Then check accuracy: the boards' requirements are about correct text, and a high raw speed with low accuracy won't help you there.

Net WPM on this page is the characters in fully correct words, including each word's trailing space, divided by five and by ten. The exact definitions are on the metrics page.