SSC Stenographer Typing Test — English Transcription

Stenographer is the only major SSC cadre where typing skill is necessary but not sufficient. Without working shorthand at the post-level speed, the dictation step ends the candidate's selection regardless of typing ability. Online practice can drill transcription pace but cannot teach shorthand — that is in-person training. If shorthand is solid and only transcription needs sharpening, this page and the simulator below cover what online practice can deliver.

SSC publishes the Stenographer skill-test rules in the annual notification. The pattern has been stable for the past decade.

Stage 1 (CBT): 200 marks, 2 hours, three sections — General Intelligence (50), General Awareness (50), English Language and Comprehension (100). The CBT result decides who qualifies for Stage 2.

Stage 2 — Step A: Dictation. The candidate sits with shorthand notebook and listens to a 10-minute audio dictation. Grade C: 100 words per minute. Grade D: 80 WPM. The full passage is written in shorthand during this window — no transcription yet.

Stage 2 — Step B: Transcription. The candidate moves to a computer terminal and transcribes the shorthand notes onto the screen. Grade C English: 40 minutes; Grade D English: 50 minutes. Hindi transcription windows are longer (55 / 65 minutes) to account for conjunct typing.

Mistake calculation: mistakes are counted against the total words in the dictated passage, not the words actually typed. A skipped sentence loses those words as omissions; a wrong substitution counts as one full mistake. Half mistakes (capitalisation, punctuation slips) count as 0.5.

Mistake bands: Grade C — 5% UR/EWS, 7% OBC, 10% SC/ST. Grade D — 7% UR/EWS, 10% OBC, 12% SC/ST. Above the band is a fail regardless of how clean the rest of the transcription was.

Qualifying only: the skill test is pass/fail. Stage 1 CBT marks decide the final merit list. But a candidate who fails the skill test is removed from the selection pool for that recruitment cycle.

The Stenographer transcription panel is a standard text editor. Backspace, arrow keys, copy-paste between paragraphs, find-and-replace — all available. Many candidates discover this only at the centre and lose the first ten minutes figuring out what the keys do. The 40 (Grade C) or 50 (Grade D) minute window is wide enough to use editing strategically, but tight enough that aimless backtracking eats the buffer.

The transcription window is not a speed test, so editing tactics that punish CHSL or DEST candidates do not apply here. The trade is the other way around: every minute spent on a single ambiguous word is a minute pulled from a clean closing pass over the whole transcript. Stenographers who clear with margin treat the window in three phases.

• Phase 1, first 60 to 65 per cent of the window. Type the transcript in a single pass without going back. Skip a word only when the shorthand outline is genuinely unreadable; insert a placeholder underscore so the omission is easy to spot during review.
• Phase 2, next 20 to 25 per cent. Re-read from the top. Resolve each underscore by re-checking the shorthand notes. Fix obvious wrong-word substitutions and any missing capitals at sentence starts. Do not touch punctuation yet.
• Phase 3, final 10 to 15 per cent. Punctuation, hyphens, paragraph breaks. The half-mistake category sits almost entirely here. Candidates who run out of time on Phase 3 lose more half-mistake points in two minutes than they accumulated in the previous thirty.

The candidates who fail despite knowing this rhythm almost always fail because they ran Phase 2 too aggressively — going back to fix words that did not need fixing, eating the Phase 3 budget. Treat Phase 2 as a sieve, not a rewrite. The transcript on screen is already mostly correct; protect what is correct first, fix only what is unambiguously wrong.