Typing Accuracy Test

Why accuracy is the number that actually matters

Speed gets the headline, but accuracy is what determines whether typing is useful. And the two are not a trade-off in the way people assume: past a certain point, accuracy is how you get faster, not what you sacrifice for it.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Because this test scores net WPM, every uncorrected error is subtracted directly. And if you do correct your errors, each one costs you a backspace, a retype, and — the expensive part — the break in rhythm while your attention jumps back to where you were.

The typist hammering out 70 gross at 90% is working considerably harder than the one at 60 gross and 95%, for a worse result. This is the single most common reason people plateau.

What counts as good

• Below 92% — errors are actively holding your speed down. Fixing accuracy will raise your WPM without you getting any faster at all.
• 95% — a solid working target, and roughly what employer assessments ask for when they state a floor.
• 98%+ — excellent. At this level, pushing speed is the right thing to work on.
• 100% every run — you are typing too cautiously. A small error rate is the sign you are working near your actual ceiling.

The three kinds of error, and what each one means

Not all mistakes have the same cause, and the fix is different for each. The results screen breaks your mistakes down by character, so you can tell them apart.

• Substitutions — you hit an adjacent key. Usually e for r, i for o, n for m. This is a positioning problem: your hand has drifted off the home row. Reset on the F and J bumps more often.
• Transpositions — you typed teh for the, or adn for and. This is a timing problem between your two hands, and it happens almost exclusively on words you type fastest. Slowing down on common words feels absurd and fixes it.
• Repeated misses on one key — the same character wrong over and over. That is either a genuinely weak reach (usually a little finger: P, Q, Z, or the apostrophe) or a failing key on your keyboard. The keyboard test tells you which.

How to actually improve it

1. Drop 10% of your speed, deliberately. Not 50% — that is so slow it teaches nothing. Just enough that you are typing at the edge of clean rather than the edge of possible.
2. Hold that pace until accuracy is boringly consistent across several runs. Not one good run: several.
3. Then let speed creep back up. It comes back on its own, and it comes back with the errors gone. Net WPM ends up higher than where you started.
4. Drill your specific weak keys rather than typing more general prose. The AI-personalised practice reads your actual mistake history and builds a passage that concentrates the keys and letter pairs you miss, which is far more efficient than hoping they come up.

If you want the full breakdown of how gross, net and accuracy relate, the gross vs net WPM guide works through the formulas.