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At the risk of coming off as an overly nuerotic 0L, I've heard typing speed can play a big part in being able to excel on certain types of law school exams. Anyone who wants to chime in on how valid that is, what they've done to improve their speed, or ways to mitigate being a slow typer would have my undying gratitude.

typeracer

It helps.

A bit.

Don't stress.

More generally, I think working quickly is very important for law exams. Typing fast is a component of that but being able to think quickly and get a lot of words out takes more than just being able to hit a high words per minute. Knowing the material very well and having taken a lot of practice exams so you are very familiar making the arguments will lead to a high final word count on your exams. If you still type with say two fingers or abnormally slow I think that may be something worth working on but otherwise I probably wouldn't stress it too much.

I've actually noticed a correlation. When people I've studied with got grades that were not on par with what they knew, I often noticed that they type like my parents and only managed to get half the words on their exams that I did. Clearly there are other factors, but it definitely can have an effect on your grades.

While some people type quicker than others, speed is partly linked to how well you know the material. It's not that the person who types 30 pages knows more than the person who types 20, but that the person who types 30 is probably not prepared if they type 10 on a subsequent test. I would be identified as a fast typer, and by the time I took my last exams I was down from 12/hour to 2/hour because I knew 0 law. However, the idea that speed is equivocal with volume is wrong. You're likely going to wind up writing more if you spend the half hour mapping out your answer. Most people have a tendency to spend too long on the first issue they spot, and this happens in practice as well. Having a plan of attack helps guard against this.

A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

Thanks for the answers everyone

CountingBlue wrote:A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

I will do this at work today, thanks

Can't touch type, but I don't 2-finger type either. Definitely wrote shorter exams. Did very well. I was also aware I was slower than average and so I tried to hit as much as I could in as few words as possible.

Not sure what this is worth, but I'd worry more about what you know and how to get it across

ETA: also wholly of the opinion that 0L prep isn't worth the work/return ratio. There is plenty of time to stress about what you aren't doing right your first semester.

Nagster5 wrote:At the risk of coming off as an overly nuerotic 0L, I've heard typing speed can play a big part in being able to excel on certain types of law school exams. Anyone who wants to chime in on how valid that is, what they've done to improve their speed, or ways to mitigate being a slow typer would have my undying gratitude.

I worked on typing before 1L year. I had no idea how to do it, and I think it really benefitted me. It is the only prep that I would actually recommend. There are a lot of factors that will determine your grade. Typing speed is one of those factors. Why not take care of a factor you can control while you have time? Even if the return is marginal, being a good typist will not hurt you in the future.

CountingBlue wrote:A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

Best I got was 43 WPM

Nagster5 wrote:

CountingBlue wrote:A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

Best I got was 43 WPM

That site sucks. It's individual words not sentences. Typeracer is a much better gauge.

http://play.typeracer.com/

The typera.net I got around 68 wpm, but I get over 100 on typeracer (which uses sentences and paragraphs rather than just strings of words.

First Offense wrote:

Nagster5 wrote:

CountingBlue wrote:A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

Best I got was 43 WPM

That site sucks. It's individual words not sentences. Typeracer is a much better gauge.

http://play.typeracer.com/

The typera.net I got around 68 wpm, but I get over 100 on typeracer (which uses sentences and paragraphs rather than just strings of words.

Yeah, I've been using typerracer for a while. My high score on there is 52. I'm using ratatype to force myself to use touch typing, but it's really hard. This took me several minutes to type.

Nagster5 wrote:

CountingBlue wrote:A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

Best I got was 43 WPM

I asked this question to a current Harvard 1L, so I'll just copy his answer here.

I would even go one further and say that typing speed isn't that important either - most classes (here at least) don't allow laptops, and most finals have a word cap, so speed isn't really an essential skill. You definitely should have basic typing competency, but typing speed above a certain level isn't really that important.

I would assume 43 would be good enough to qualify as competent, although other schools may have a drastically different test setup than Harvard.

The faster you can type, the more time you will have in the end to re-read your answer, make corrections, additions, etc. I believe that typing speed can play a non-insignificant role in your exam taking strategy. Typing fast works for me. It'll probably be helpful for you, too. But, you still have to know the law cold, be cognizant of time management, etc. It's just one factor among many.

I'd rather be the guy who types 50wpm and is constantly typing into examsoft than be the guy who's fucking around with his outline for half the exam, but types 80wpm. Although ideally, be a fast typist and never look at your outline.

twenty wrote: ideally, be a fast typist and never look at your outline.

Yeah that's the goal. If it makes the difference between one grade throughout law school, I will consider it time well spent. Plus it's a useful skill anyway.

jrass wrote:While some people type quicker than others, speed is partly linked to how well you know the material. It's not that the person who types 30 pages knows more than the person who types 20, but that the person who types 30 is probably not prepared if they type 10 on a subsequent test. I would be identified as a fast typer, and by the time I took my last exams I was down from 12/hour to 2/hour because I knew 0 law. However, the idea that speed is equivocal with volume is wrong. You're likely going to wind up writing more if you spend the half hour mapping out your answer. Most people have a tendency to spend too long on the first issue they spot, and this happens in practice as well. Having a plan of attack helps guard against this.

This. A lot of people focus on typing speed but the true bottleneck is how quickly you can get your thoughts and analysis into a coherent sentence. So if you can type as fast as a court reporter but have to constantly go back and forth between your notes, that typing speed isn't going to get you anywhere. If you want to up your speed I would practice memorizing certain concepts so that you won't need to look back at your materials.

Nagster5 wrote:

CountingBlue wrote:A really simple site is http://typera.net/. If you spend 30 minutes ago trying to get a good score and reporting back then I will give you my entirely uninformed opinion whether typing will be a bottleneck for you.

Best I got was 43 WPM

I should have clarified that you should switch to the sentence rather than the individual word test on typera. Regardless, 40-50wpm isn't terrible, but as other have recommended, I would certainly take the effort to improve it.

If you are able to craft brilliant essays with crisp concise prose, then perhaps wpm doesn't matter. However if you are normal mortal then being able to say even 10 percent more during the exam is worth something (I am assuming here that you could get up to 70wpm but the 40 percent speed increase only leads to a 10 percent, in practice, improvement due to the bottleneck associated with spotting issues and recalling your material).

Even in fixed word exams typing speed matters. The sooner you finish, the more time you have to find issues you missed or fit a few more case cites into your essay. 10 percent overall speed increase is 18 minutes on a 3 hour test. That is an eternity.

The reason I like typera for practicing is that the 2 minute mode better emulates the endurance typing that makes of a law exam. With that said, if you like TypeRacer, I do not see any reason not to use it.