What is Good Accuracy When it Comes to Typing?

In most academic subjects, students are reaching for an A and a 90% is the cutoff point for this coveted letter grade.

In typing, though, settling for 90% accuracy is a huge mistake.

If 10% of the words you type contain errors, you can hardly call yourself a proficient typist.

Let’s say, for example, that you need to write an email to the principal that contains 500 words. If you were typing with 90% accuracy, that means that 50 of these words would contain errors!

Not very impressive.

So if 90% is too low, where should we set the accuracy bar for students?

To some extent, this depends on the age, with younger students being allowed a bit more leeway for errors.

In general, though, students in 4th grade and up should be aiming for 98%+ accuracy while typing.

Will such high accuracy mean sacrificing speed? At first, it definitely will and that’s ok!

It’s much more important that students learn to type correctly first, before learning to type quickly.

Setting Accuracy Benchmarks in Your Class

Have a plan in place for what your class expectations are as far as accuracy goes.

As a teacher, you can set the bar for what percentage of accuracy constitutes “mastery”.

This percentage may change over the course of the year or depending on the abilities and ages of your students.

At the beginning of the year, it might make sense to start with 95% accuracy constituting passing.

Any student who completes a lesson with less than 95% accuracy needs to go back and do the work again, being more accuracy-aware the second time around.

Soon, though, this percentage should be bumped up little by little until students are being held to 98% accuracy or better on each lesson.

Holding such a high bar is bound to slow kids down a bit, but it’s more important that they form good habits now. Speed will come later.

Incentivizing Typing Accuracy

There are plenty of ways teachers can incentivize accuracy when it comes to using Typing.com.

Create a leaderboard in your classroom where students with the highest accuracy averages get special recognition.

Or give students a raffle ticket every time they complete a lesson with 100% accuracy. At the end of the week, you can draw tickets for prizes.

Placing value on the importance of typing accuracy will pay off in the long run as your students develop the typing habits and muscle memory to hit the right key every time, and catch themselves if they don’t.