(Posted November 2024)
Each year, we talk to candidates who are struggling in their CPA Common Final Examination (CFE) studies because of slow or inaccurate typing skills. While being a slow typer is not a dealbreaker, improving your typing skills can help give you more time to think and get more of your thoughts down in your response.
First, how do you know if you are a slow typer? An average typing speed is 40 words per minute (WPM). For a high level of productivity, you should aim for 60-70 WPM. It is also important to develop accuracy so you should aim for 90-95% accuracy.
Here are some tips for improving your typing skills and speed:
Start Early
You can’t improve your typing skills overnight. If you ask how to improve your typing 2-3 weeks out from the CFE, our answer is going to be that you just can’t. You don’t have enough time and energy to focus on typing when you need to be writing, marking, and debriefing cases.
Practice
Improving any skill takes practice, and typing is no exception. Luckily, there are many free options for practicing your typing skills that range from online lessons to practical practice. Websites such as Typing Club, Typing.com, or LearnTyping offer free lessons to help you improve your typing. You can also practice these skills by typing in your day-to-day life, whether that be at work, or at home.
Multiple shorter practice sessions can provide more benefit than sustained longer ones because typing depends on muscle memory and muscle memory is built better by more frequent practice than the length of each practice session.
Beware of the negative impacts of too much practice – muscle fatigue and carpal tunnel are real issues that can develop from too much practice, especially if you don’t use those muscle areas often. You’ll need to build up your typing stamina so start with shorter sessions and ramp up your practice time, watching for any physical discomfort.
Posture
Typing speed is better with good posture. Your screen should be at eye level. Sitting up straight and bending your elbows at a right angle, keeping your wrists straight, will help you type faster. To prevent pain and fatigue in your wrists and shoulders, try not to tense up your shoulders, arms, and hands.
Home Row
Touch typing will help you build speed by helping you know where you are on the keyboard without having to look at the keys. Using the home row (ASDF and JKL; keys) as a starting point and memorizing the locations of the other keys in relation to the home row will help you improve your typing speed.
Focus on Your Screen
As noted above, you want to be able to type without having to look at the keys the whole time. As you learn to type, focus on your screen instead of the keys. You can catch the mistakes you are making as you go and figure out how to correct them in real time. Making errors is actually one of the main issues that impact typing speed as each error requires you to slow down to go back and correct the error. Minimizing those errors earlier on to improve your accuracy will help you build your typing speed later.
Slow Down to Speed Up
Try to practice at a steady pace. Trying to rush and type faster will result in more mistakes. Instead, slow down and focus on getting the keystrokes for each letter correct so that you can then put it together and work to increase your speed once your accuracy for each key has been established. Practice each technique and don’t try to rush through all of them in one sitting. Aim for mastery before moving on to the next step.
Websites such as Keybr.com can help you gain speed by focusing on your weaknesses. It monitors your accuracy and adapts to focus on fixing your bad habits. While this can be frustrating, it will also help you to improve more quickly by focusing on your specific areas of weakness.
Set a Practice Schedule
As noted above, multiple shorter practice sessions will help you improve faster. If you don’t set aside a certain time each day to practice, the reality is that life gets in the way and you won’t practice as planned. Set aside 15 minutes per day, at least four times per week. To help you stick to your practice schedule, include it in your current routine by blocking the same time each day. Start now so that you have time to build your typing speed and skills over the next several months.
Typing and the CFE
It is also important to note that even if you do improve your typing speed dramatically, you may not be able to sustain that when you are writing exams. An adult’s thought process is significantly faster than even the fastest typer’s speed. Typing out your thoughts will slow down and interrupt your thought process.
Typing speed relies on flow, and as you stop to think, that will be interrupted. This is one reason why on a thinking exam like the CFE, we encourage you to stop and think before you start writing your response. This will allow you to type uninterrupted by your cognitive processes and get your compiled thoughts down without interruption.