Build a custom typing test

What the custom test is for

Every dedicated exam page on TypeForExam locks its settings to the official notification. The SSC CHSL page always runs 10 minutes against a 35 WPM English cutoff, because that is what the Commission’s software does. Custom mode removes the locks. You choose the language and keyboard layout, the duration, the target speed, the backspace rule, and the passage register — and the test engine runs your configuration with the same timer, the same scoring formulas, and the same certificate flow as every standard test on this site.

Three groups of typists end up here. The first is preparing for a post we have not built a page for yet: a state PSC clerk grade, a PSU office assistant vacancy, a university non-teaching post, a district court with its own local rules. Their notification names a speed and a duration, and custom mode reproduces both. The second group has cleared one cutoff and is training for the next tier — a 35 WPM CHSL qualifier pushing toward the 50 WPM that SSC Stenographer Grade D transcription demands. The third is not preparing for any exam at all, just rebuilding office typing speed against a measurable target.

One thing custom mode does not do, so you know before you start: it does not accept pasted text. Passages come from our curated pool, written in the registers Indian recruitment tests draw from. If you want to practise on your coaching institute’s material, the FAQ at the bottom of this page covers the closest workaround.

How to set up a session, step by step

1. Pick the language and layout. Twelve options: English (QWERTY), Hindi in two layouts, plus Nepali, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, and Malayalam. The Hindi split matters more than beginners expect — Kruti Dev uses the Remington layout with a legacy font, while Mangal uses InScript Unicode, and the two place characters on different keys. Pick the layout your exam mandates, not the one you find easier.
2. Set the duration. Five lengths from 3 to 20 minutes. Ten minutes is the standard window for SSC, RRB, and most court tests; fifteen matches the SSC CGL DEST; twenty exists for stamina work that no real exam requires but every serious candidate benefits from.
3. Set the target speed. Enter any figure from 10 to 120 Net WPM, nudge it with the −5/+5 steppers, or tap a preset (30, 35, 50, 65 — the four most common Indian cutoffs). The summary card converts your target to KDPH as you change it, at the fixed rate of 300 key depressions per hour for each WPM. If your notification quotes key depressions instead of words, the WPM ↔ KDPH converter works in both directions.
4. Choose the backspace rule. Allowed is the modern default — SSC CHSL, IBPS, RRB, and DSSSB all permit corrections. Disabled mirrors SSC Stenographer transcription and a handful of legacy state tests where every error is permanent.
5. Choose a passage style. Five registers: administrative prose (the SSC staple), economic and governance text for banking aspirants, legal and judicial language for court posts, news-style copy, and literary prose for state PSC humanities passages.
6. Check the summary, then start. The card on the right shows the full configuration plus the KDPH equivalent of your target. The Start button opens the same name-and-email popup every test on this site uses, so your practice certificate carries your details. The timer begins on your first keystroke, not when the page loads.

A practical note: your settings travel inside the test link itself. Bookmark the test page once it opens and you can rerun the identical configuration tomorrow without touching the builder again.

Settings that recreate real exams

The most productive use of custom mode is mirroring an exam’s published conditions while changing one variable — usually the target. Here are the configurations that match the exams aspirants ask us about most, taken from the same notifications our dedicated pages are built on.

Two caveats on the table. Individual High Courts and district courts publish their own rules, so treat the court-clerk row as the common standard rather than a guarantee — the court clerk page tracks the variations we know about. And these mirrors are for repetition drills; when an exam has a dedicated page, that page carries the passage history, marking scheme, and week-by-week plan that custom mode deliberately leaves out.

Training routines beyond exam mirroring

Over-speed training

Set the target 5 WPM above your actual cutoff and train there for two weeks. A CHSL aspirant who practises at 40 WPM walks into a 35 WPM exam with margin to spare, which matters because exam-hall conditions reliably cost candidates 2–4 WPM against their practice scores. The presets jump in steps that match the common cutoffs; the stepper moves in fives for everything in between.

Stamina runs

Most aspirants practise in 5-minute bursts and then sit a 10- or 15-minute exam. The decay is predictable: accuracy holds for the first 6–8 minutes, then wrists tighten and the error rate climbs through the back half of the passage. One or two 15- or 20-minute runs per week, at a relaxed target, teach your hands to hold form past the point where the real exam ends.

Weak-key repair

The result page records which expected characters you missed most. Use that report to pick your next register: if punctuation keys dominate the list, run legal passages, which are dense with commas, semicolons, and section references. If digits trip you, run economic passages, where percentages and rupee figures force the number row. Two focused sessions on a hostile register fix more than ten sessions of comfortable prose.

No-backspace discipline

Even if your exam allows corrections, run one session a week with backspace disabled. Knowing that errors are permanent changes how you type: you slow down a fraction before unfamiliar words instead of repairing damage after. Candidates who train this way tend to gross lower but net higher, because the error deduction is what sinks most failed attempts.

How scoring works here

The engine measures at character level. Gross WPM counts every keystroke you make — right or wrong — divides by five (the standard word length used by every Indian government test), and divides again by minutes elapsed. Net WPM deducts your uncorrected errors: net equals gross minus errors per minute, floored at zero. Accuracy is correct keystrokes as a percentage of total keystrokes. While backspace is allowed, deleting a wrong character removes it from the error count, so only mistakes still standing at the buzzer cost you. The engine also re-aligns at word boundaries: if you drop a letter mid-word and hit space, the skipped characters are marked as errors and the cursor snaps to the next word, so one slip does not cascade through the rest of the passage.

Real exams count differently, and the differences matter when you interpret your score. SSC’s software works word by word, classing each mistake as full or half before deducting from gross speed. Court tests generally quote a minimum Net WPM after error deduction, which is the closest match to our formula. KDPH systems — RRB NTPC, India Post — measure raw key depressions per hour with a separate accuracy floor. CPCT reports NWPM directly. Character-level counting, the method used here, is the strictest of these because it catches every wrong keystroke rather than rounding to word-level mistakes. Treat your Net WPM on this test as a floor: if you clear your cutoff here, you have headroom under the gentler official formulas.

Choosing passage difficulty and length

Register changes difficulty more than people expect. Administrative prose is the friendliest: common vocabulary, regular sentence rhythm, light punctuation. News copy adds proper nouns. Economic text introduces digits, decimal points, and the % sign — every trip to the number row costs a fraction of a second and breaks your home-row rhythm. Legal language is the hardest of the five: long subordinate clauses, semicolons, Act names with years attached, and Latin terms your fingers have never sequenced. If your exam publishes sample passages, match the register; if it does not, train one register harder than you expect on test day.

Length expectations follow from arithmetic. The words you must produce equal your target multiplied by the minutes, so plan sessions against real volumes:

For comparison, the SSC CGL DEST asks for 2,000 key depressions in 15 minutes — about 400 words — which is why its effective speed floor sits near 27 WPM despite the longer window. Our passage pool holds 16 passages per language, each 120–150 words of connected prose, and the engine remembers which ones your browser has seen so you face unseen text first. Memorising the pool defeats the purpose; rotating through registers keeps the test honest.

Frequently asked questions