Ten minutes of dictation, fifty minutes of transcription
The recruitment notice for this post states: the dictation is of 10 minutes at 80 words per minute; transcription is allowed 50 minutes for English; and a candidate is treated as failing only if errors exceed 5 per cent of the dictated words. The notice defines an error as a wrongly spelt word, an omitted word or an added word. Errors of punctuation and of capitalisation are not counted, and the expansion of an abbreviation that was dictated as an abbreviation is not an addition.
You have just finished. Your notebook shows 800 dictated words. Your typescript runs to 812 words, because you wrote "Government of India" where the passage had "Govt. of India" four times, and "Employees' State Insurance Corporation" where it had "ESIC" twice. On checking you find 12 mis-spelt words, 4 words omitted, and 2 words added that are not expansions of anything.
You finished typing in 47 minutes.
1. Compute your error count and error percentage under the notified rule, and state the verdict.
Read the worked answer
The denominator is the dictated text, not the typescript: 800 words. That matters because your typescript is 12 words longer and the extra 12 are not yours to be penalised for.
Now sort each category:
- Mis-spellings: 12 errors.
- Omissions: 4 errors.
- Added words that are not expansions: 2 errors.
- Punctuation and capitalisation slips: not counted at all - they do not appear in the definition.
- The 12 extra words in your typescript (4 × "Govt." and 2 × "ESIC" written out) are expressly excluded: expansion of a dictated abbreviation is not an addition. The arithmetic confirms it: 4 × 1 + 2 × 4 = 12, which is exactly the length difference.
Total = 12 + 4 + 2 = 18 errors. Percentage = 18 ÷ 800 × 100 = 2.25 per cent, comfortably inside the 5 per cent ceiling. Verdict: pass on the transcription, with no need to touch the expansions.
2. A colleague says the two added words should be forgiven as "small slips" and that the abbreviations should be left as dictated to keep the word count identical. Respond.
Read the worked answer
Both suggestions are wrong, for different reasons.
The two added words are errors on the plain words of the notice. An addition is an addition unless it is the expansion of a dictated abbreviation; these two are not, so they count. Forgiving them "because they are small" is not a judgement you are entitled to make - the counting rule is the rule, and 18 versus 16 changes nothing here (2.00 per cent against 2.25 per cent) but would change everything for a candidate sitting at 4.9 per cent. Consistency is the point of a mechanical rule.
Writing "Govt." and "ESIC" instead of expanding them is defensible in itself - the notice protects expansions but does not compel them - yet the reason given is wrong: there is no requirement that the typescript match the dictated word count, because the denominator is the dictated text. On a fair copy for an office, expanded forms are in fact preferable, since a fair copy is read by people who were not in the room. Keep the expansions; do not invent a rule to justify them.
3. You have three minutes left. Should you recopy the typescript, or use the time another way?
Read the worked answer
Do not recopy. You are at 2.25 per cent against a 5 per cent limit, so you have no arithmetic reason to buy back errors, and a recopy is the classic way to lose a pass: 800-odd words retyped in three minutes is impossible, a partial retype produces a mixed document, and fresh transcription errors would be added to the old ones. The risk is all downside and the gain is nil.
Use the three minutes on targeted checking, in this order of consequence: numbers, dates, amounts and names first - in an office passage a wrong figure is a substantive error even though the notice scores it the same as a misspelling; then the words adjacent to the 4 omissions, since a dropped "not" or "only" reverses meaning; then a quick read of the last two lines, which is where hurried transcription always degrades.
If a check turns up an error that changes meaning, correct it and initial it. Reformatting, retyping headings and tidying margins are all wasted minutes at this stage.