Competitive Advantage

Many writers are so focused on their technical ability, making cue cards or binders filled with notes, that they sometimes don’t think about other skills to work on that can assist with passing the CFE.

As the Day 2 exam is 300 minutes, if a writer can spend the 8-10 months leading up to the exam learning to type 5 more words per minute, that’s 1500 more words that you will be able to type during the exam, or up to an extra page or two of work. Moreover, you could also use this additional time to help with reading the case, planning the case, or with developing your quantitative analysis.

You need to first understand where you are today. You will be able to look up any number of websites that will assist in assessing your speed and accuracy (I used https://www.typingtest.com/). Over the years, I’ve asked students that I’ve worked with to do this, and I find that the average typing speed is around 80 words per minute, with an accuracy rate of about 85-90%.

Once you understand your score, it’s all about tracking and then beating that score, taking these tests repeatedly and always challenging yourself to do better. It may just take 5 minutes a day, but you should start to see some improved results over time (practice makes perfect, right?). There are also paid website services that you can use such as Typesy, KeyBlaze or UltraKey 6. But I find that using free software like these typing tests or Typing.com is enough for most students, and saves a few dollars as well.