Andaman & Nicobar Typing Test — English
40 WPM English on a 5-minute passage. Skill-test gate for Andaman & Nicobar Islands UT clerical recruitments — LDC, Junior Office Assistant, Stenographer, and Computer Operator under the Lt. Governor's Secretariat. The Department of Personnel & Administrative Reforms coordinates most recruitment. This page covers the cutoff, scoring, common mistakes, and a four-week plan calibrated to A&N's English-medium administrative pattern.
- Speed cutoff
- 40 WPM English
- Duration
- 5 min
- Source
- A&N Administration
- Layout
- English QWERTY
- Scoring
- Net WPM
Who takes the A&N Administration typing test
Andaman & Nicobar Islands Administration (Lt. Governor's Secretariat) hires across UT clerical and stenographer cadres. Each post sets its own speed and language requirement; the typical cutoffs are listed above.
Lower Division Clerk
LDC is the entry-level clerical cadre across UT administration departments. Cutoff is 40 WPM English at 5 minutes. The test is qualifying and runs post-mains.
Junior Office Assistant (JOA)
JOA cadres handle secretariat-level support work. Same 40 WPM English cutoff plus a brief computer-skills assessment in some recruitment cycles.
Police Constable Clerk
A&N Police clerical recruitments include English typing at 40 WPM as part of the skill test. Posted across the Andaman and Nicobar district HQs.
Tribal Welfare clerical / PSU cadres
A&N's PSU and Tribal Welfare Department recruitments follow the UT clerical pattern. Speeds and durations match the LDC standard.
Andaman & Nicobar's typing-test landscape is uniformly English-medium. The practical target is 45 WPM English with 95% accuracy — comfortably above the 40 WPM cutoff and competitive against other applicants. Standard QWERTY only. The competition pool is small (the islands' total population is under 400,000), making recruitment timing and notification awareness more important than raw speed beyond the cutoff.
Official typing test pattern
A&N Administration publishes the typing test specification with each recruitment cycle for the Union Territory cadres covered on this page. The format is closer to the central government CHSL/CGL template than to neighbouring state PSCs.
Duration: 5 min. The timer is server-driven and centrally synchronised across all candidates at the centre. A candidate who clicks Begin five seconds late loses those five seconds — the cohort timer does not restart per candidate.
Speed cutoff: 40 WPM English as the qualifying floor. Higher speeds do not earn merit marks; the typing test is purely qualifying. But the floor is enforced strictly — no rounding, no leniency for first-time candidates.
Medium: the language chosen at the online application stage. The choice is fixed once the application closes and cannot be switched on the test day.
Qualifying nature. The Andaman & Nicobar typing test is a screen-out, not a contributor to rank. Cleared, the application moves to the next stage; missed, the application is removed from the pool for the cycle with no compensation from written-examination performance.
How the typing test is scored
The scoring engine for Andaman & Nicobar is two cutoffs in series, not a combined score. Net WPM is the headline; accuracy is the silent partner. Failing either removes the application from the appointment pool, which is why preparation has to target both metrics deliberately rather than picking one as the priority.
Gross WPM
For Andaman & Nicobar, Gross WPM is computed the same way every typing assessment computes it: characters / 5 / minutes. The formula is not exam-specific. The exam-specific element is what happens to Gross WPM after it is calculated — the error penalty model that produces Net WPM.
Net WPM
The Andaman & Nicobar Net WPM formula is symmetric on errors. Wrong character: one error. Missing character: one error. There is no asymmetry to exploit by leaving the end of the passage blank, because the missing characters at the end count just as heavily as the typos in the middle.
What the scoring rule actually rewards
Two cutoffs in parallel: a speed floor and an accuracy floor, with no trade-off between them. A high-speed-low-accuracy finish does not pass on the speed alone — accuracy is independently checked. The practical implication is that disciplined pacing through the full window beats burst-speed performance.
Worked example
Gross WPM = (1080 + 3) / 5 / 5 = 43.32 WPM
Net WPM = 43.32 − (3 / 5) = 42.72 WPM
Accuracy = 1080 / 1083 × 100 = 99.72%
Both gates clear: Net WPM of 42.72 sits 2.72 above the 40 WPM floor, and accuracy at 99.72% is comfortably above the 95% requirement. Hitting that band in mock conditions a fortnight before the test date is the realistic preparation target. The bare cutoff itself is the failure threshold, not the aim.
Backspace at A&N Islands Administration typing centres
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands UT is administered through the Lt. Governor's Secretariat in Port Blair. Recruitment for ministerial cadres — LDC, UDC, Junior Secretariat Assistant, Steno-Typist, and Police-Ministerial posts under the A&N Administration — runs through cycle-based notifications coordinated with the Ministry of Home Affairs. Typing tests happen primarily at the Administrator's Secretariat complex on South Andaman, with overflow handling at the Government Polytechnic in Port Blair during high-volume cycles. Backspace is permitted on the current testing platform, which migrated to a TCS-iON-comparable system in 2023.
A&N's typing-test context is shaped by its physical geography — the candidate pool is split across South Andaman (mainland Port Blair), Middle and North Andaman, Little Andaman, and the Nicobar group (Car Nicobar, Nancowry, Great Nicobar). Inter-island travel relies on sea ferries and limited helicopter services. The Lt. Governor's Secretariat operates primarily in English, with Hindi for inter-state liaison and Bengali / Tamil / Telugu for substantial settler-population administrative work. A&N's linguistic profile is bilingual-functional rather than dominated by a single regional language.
Three rules calibrated to A&N's distinctive testing context:
- Inter-island ferry buffer rule. Candidates from North Andaman, Little Andaman, or any Nicobar island travel to Port Blair via sea ferry. Schedules are weather-dependent; SOI (Shipping Corporation of India) and government-ferry sailings can be cancelled with 12 hours notice during the October-March north-east monsoon and June-September south-west monsoon. Build a 48-hour pre-test arrival buffer; the test cycle does not formally accommodate weather-cancelled travel.
- Settler-community vocabulary lock rule. A&N's administrative content references settler populations from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Bihar — typical passage vocabulary includes "Bengali settler refugee resettlement", "tribal welfare schedule", "Jarawa Tribal Reserve", "indigenous Sentinelese protection". Candidates trained on standard mainland-administration corpus meet these terms unprepared.
- Five-minute closure rule. A&N sittings are 5 minutes. Final 45 seconds is no-backspace zone. The small candidate pool and limited annual cycle make finishing the passage non-negotiable; missing-character penalties accumulate faster than typed-but-wrong penalties at the A&N selection margin.
The most expensive A&N-specific failure mode is the Nicobar-island candidate who books the cycle-day morning ferry from Car Nicobar to Port Blair, encounters an SOI service cancellation, and loses the entire cycle to a weather event. The UT Administration's posted appeal mechanism for weather-disrupted cycles is limited; resubmission usually applies to the next annual cycle window.
Six A&N-specific mistakes that fail Islands Administration candidates
These failure modes apply specifically to A&N Islands UT Administration typing cycles — inter-island ferry logistics, multi-language settler-community administrative context, tribal-welfare cadre placement, and the Port-Blair-concentrated testing infrastructure.
Booking cycle-day morning ferry from non-South-Andaman islands
Candidates from Middle/North Andaman, Little Andaman, or Nicobar travel to Port Blair via sea ferry. The SOI ferry schedule from Car Nicobar to Port Blair, for example, runs roughly twice weekly with weather contingency. A candidate booking the morning ferry on test day faces a coin-flip risk during monsoon months. The UT Administration treats travel failure as the candidate's responsibility; there is no automatic reattempt mechanism for missed cycles.
Arrive in Port Blair at least 48 hours before the test, more during monsoon. Pre-book accommodation through Port Blair's transit-housing network or PWD guest house if eligible.Underestimating the multi-language operational environment
A&N's resident population includes substantial Bengali-speaking (1960s Partition resettlement), Tamil-speaking (Sri Lankan Tamil resettlement), Telugu-speaking (post-Independence settlement), and Hindi-speaking communities alongside indigenous Andamanese populations. The Lt. Governor's Secretariat operates in English, but day-to-day file work at tehsil level often involves bilingual or trilingual interactions. Candidates who train exclusively in English may find inter-language correspondence challenges at posting.
Train English to 38+ WPM as the priority. Add basic Hindi typing competency (25+ WPM) as the secondary language; this single secondary covers most settler-community interactions at tehsil level.Skipping A&N-specific administrative vocabulary drilling
A&N Administration passages reference unique entities: "Andaman Trunk Road" (the disputed ATR linking Port Blair to Diglipur), "Jarawa Tribal Reserve", "Nicobari panchayat tribal-council", "Inter-Island Vessel Sailing Schedule", "ANIDCO" (A&N Islands Integrated Development Corporation), "ANIIDCO" (industrial wing), "MITS" (Marine Inspection and Training Services). These compound nouns recur and slow candidates trained on mainland corpus.
Build a personal 25-term A&N-administration vocabulary list. Source: andaman.gov.in scheme PDFs, Daily Telegrams (Port Blair newspaper) state-affairs coverage, MHA UT-section circulars on A&N matters. Drill the list daily from week 2.Mishandling the tribal-welfare cadre cycle
A&N Administration cycles include specific posts in the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS) and Tribal Welfare Department that handle interactions with Jarawa, Onge, Sentinelese, and Great Andamanese tribal populations. These ministerial cadres require additional cultural-sensitivity training beyond the typing-test stage. Candidates who chose this cadre for the lower applicant ratio without understanding the operational context face cultural-adjustment challenges at posting.
If considering tribal-welfare cadre placements, read the Anthropological Survey of India's A&N tribes documentation before applying. The cadre is valuable but operationally demanding in ways that typing prep alone doesn't address.Underestimating the Port Blair selection compression
A&N annual cycle vacancies are small (15-30 ministerial posts typically). The eligible candidate pool (UT-resident plus Indian-citizen domiciled) is also small but selection margins compress around the published cutoff. A candidate clearing exactly 35 WPM English doesn't guarantee selection in a cycle where 60-80 applicants compete for 20 vacancies. Effective margins often require 42+ WPM.
Train to 45 WPM English in practice. The buffer absorbs cycle-specific selection-margin compression that the small Port Blair candidate pool produces.Missing the AAJVS-specific Hindi-script requirement
Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS) ministerial posts sometimes include a Hindi-typing component in the cycle-specific notification. The Hindi typing requirement isn't always part of the parent A&N Administration typing test but is tested at a separate stage. Candidates focused only on English typing for general A&N cycles may miss the AAJVS Hindi requirement entirely.
If applying to AAJVS or Tribal Welfare cadre cycles, verify the Hindi-typing requirement in the post-specific annexure. Add Hindi Mangal Inscript prep alongside English if required.A five-week A&N Islands UT typing plan
A&N prep should prioritise English (Lt. Governor's Secretariat language) with Hindi as a secondary language for inter-state liaison and settler-community work. The plan accounts for Port Blair travel logistics that don't exist for mainland recruitment cycles.
English foundation with A&N context
- Daily 30-minute English typing on QWERTY home-row
- Read A&N Tourism and Daily Telegrams content each evening
- Begin compiling 25-term A&N-administration vocabulary list
- No timed mocks this week — fluency first
A&N corpus integration
- Switch corpus to A&N Administration content
- Drill the 25-term A&N-administration vocabulary list
- Add Hindi Mangal warmup (15 min) for AAJVS-track candidates
- One full 5-minute mock at end of week
Speed ramp on UT corpus
- Daily 5-minute English passage mock
- Settler-community vocabulary lock rule reinforced
- Begin planning Port Blair travel logistics; book ferry / accommodation
- Mid-week rest day
Buffer-build for selection compression
- Two full 5-minute mocks per day at expected exam-slot time
- Five-minute closure rule strictly enforced
- External keyboard from this week onwards
- Confirm ferry booking and Port Blair accommodation
Travel logistics and centre simulation
- Two mocks per day for first three days, then one per day
- Travel to Port Blair with 48-hour arrival buffer (more during monsoon)
- Final two days completely off — rest beats final drilling
- UT domicile or Indian-citizen documents verified pre-arrival
Practise on the exact cutoff, in the exact format
5-minute Andaman & Nicobar mock with full scoring transparency: Gross WPM, Net WPM, accuracy percentage, error count by type. The breakdown is the value — knowing where the cutoff miss came from tells you which drill to run before the next session.
Start Free Andaman & Nicobar Islands Practice →Frequently asked questions
Quick-reference answers to the questions candidates send in. All figures referenced against A&N Administration as of the current recruitment window.
40 WPM English at 5 minutes for LDC, Junior Office Assistant, Stenographer posts. Some posts offer regional-language typing as an alternative. Confirm in the specific notification.
LDC, Junior Office Assistant, Stenographer are the primary cadres. Each post sets its own speed and language requirement; the typical cutoffs are listed above.
A&N Administration typing is primarily English-medium. Regional-language options exist for state-medium posts in some cadres. Always check the specific notification.
Net WPM = Gross WPM minus errors per minute. Most assessments require 95% accuracy in addition to the WPM cutoff. The skill test is qualifying.
Most modern A&N Administration exam-centre software allows backspace and basic editing. Verify in the assessment instructions.
Formal English prose — administrative, governance, or general-knowledge topics. About 400-500 characters in a 5-minute window.
From 20 WPM to 40 WPM English: three to four weeks of thirty focused minutes a day. Below half-cutoff: six to eight weeks.