The examination is written on a keyboard. That makes typing a bar skill, in the same way that handwriting was a bar skill when it was written on paper: not the point of the exercise, and a hard limit on how much of the exercise you can complete.
Most candidates never measure it. This article is about measuring, and about the drills that actually transfer.
The arithmetic, first
Twelve minutes per question. An answer that scores well is roughly 150 to 250 words — a conclusion, a rule with its elements, an application, a conclusion. Call it 200 words in ten minutes of writing time, with two minutes for reading and checking.
That is 20 words a minute of sustained composition — far below anyone's typing speed, which is why the pace is never the binding constraint on a single question.
The binding constraint is cumulative: across a sitting you write perhaps 4,000 words. If you type at 25 wpm, writing alone consumes 160 minutes of a 240-minute paper, leaving almost nothing for reading, thinking and checking. At 50 wpm, it consumes 80, leaving 160 for the part that earns marks.
So the target is modest and specific: sustained composition at 40–50 words a minute, with accuracy high enough that you are not editing.
Accuracy is the whole game
A paragraph typed with eight errors costs more than a paragraph typed slowly. In a plain text box with a clock running, errors get repaired twice: once at the moment (backspace, retype) and once in the final check, if you have time to check at all.
The trade is not close. A 40 wpm typist with 99% accuracy finishes a paper with clean text and time to spare; a 70 wpm typist at 92% accuracy finishes with a minefield of transposed names and half-finished clauses, and spends the last twenty minutes repairing instead of completing the unanswered questions.
Two consequences:
- Type as you type, not as you wish you typed. If slowing to 45 wpm produces clean prose, 45 wpm is your speed and it is enough.
- Never learn to type faster by typing recklessly. The habit transfers to the sitting, where recklessness is expensive.
What to measure
Once a month, five minutes:
- Speed. Type a passage of legal prose — a provision, a decision's ruling paragraph — for exactly five minutes, then count words, divide by five. Do not correct errors during the drill; note them.
- Accuracy. Count the errors in the same five minutes. Errors per hundred words is the number that matters; keep it under two.
- Composition speed (the one that matters most). Take one past question, type the answer for twelve minutes, and count the words you produced that were answer, not throat-clearing.
Track the third number. It is the real pace, and it usually improves faster than raw typing speed, because most of the gain comes from not stalling.
The drills that transfer
Type from a read text, not from thought. Copy a page of a decision for ten minutes. This trains the mechanical layer separately from the legal one, and it is where raw speed improves.
Type your own outlines. Take a page of your outline and retype it from memory. This trains composition at the keyboard, which is the actual task.
Twelve-minute answer sprints. One question, twelve minutes, plain text box, no formatting, no spellcheck. Then read what you produced. The read is the point: it shows where you hesitated, and hesitation is what eats minutes.
Long-form endurance. Once a week, type for two unbroken hours — a full ten questions, or a mock sitting. The third hour is a different physical experience from the first, and only long practice finds that out.
Disable the aids. Spellcheck, autocorrect, smart quotes, auto-capitalisation. The platform will not have your word processor's dictionary, and autocorrect that rewrites "ponencia" into something else mid-answer is a small disaster in a timed sitting.
The habits that cost minutes
- Rewriting paragraphs. The keyboard makes rewriting easy, and rewriting is the most expensive way to spend the last twenty minutes. Write the answer once, then insert only.
- Formatting. Bold, italics, bullets — none of it survives, all of it costs keystrokes and attention.
- The perfect first sentence. Candidates stall on openers. Write the conclusion as a blunt sentence and keep going; you can soften it later, or not.
- Correcting what nobody will mark. A typo in a party's middle initial is not a mark; a missing conclusion is three.
- Tab-hunting. In a text box, arrows and shortcuts vary. If your practice box behaves differently from a word processor, that is the box you should practise in.
The physical side
Two hours of typing is a muscular task. Small preparations:
- Keyboard you know. If the Centre provides equipment, ask what it is; if you bring your own, use it for at least a month beforehand.
- Wrists and shoulders. Practise at a desk, screen at eye level, wrists not resting on the edge.
- Breaks that are not breaks. Every twenty minutes, five seconds on something distant, and a slow shoulder roll while thinking. Never stop typing time to stretch — think instead, then type.
- Hydration, planned. Four hours without water is a headache at hour three. Plan when you drink, and how, without losing a question to a bathroom break.
When your hands are slower than your mind
Some candidates type at 35 wpm and know their subject well. Their answer is not "learn to type faster in three weeks" — that is not achievable — but "write shorter, better answers".
- Cut the throat-clearing. Facts restated, definitions nobody asked for: each costs keystrokes and earns nothing.
- Use the compressed structures. Numbered requisites, one-clause distinctions, "Applied: …" — all carry more marks per word than flowing prose, and they are faster to type.
- Practise the four-line answer described in when you cannot answer a question, so that a short answer is available under pressure.
A 180-word answer that hits the rubric beats a 400-word answer that is still being typed when the clock stops.
One month before
By the last month, your typing should be a settled fact, not a project. Two things only:
- Twelve-minute sprints, daily, in a plain box.
- One full sitting a week, typed, timed, on the hardware you will use.
Everything else — speed drills, posture, keyboard shopping — belongs earlier in the year. In the pre-week, the only thing worth rehearsing is the shape of the answer and the reliability of your hands at hour three.
For the platform itself — navigation, saving, what to expect from the software — see the electronic bar platform.