The 38 Doubtful Outlines at the 22-Minute Mark
A candidate sits the UPMSP stenography test. The passage is dictated at 80 wpm for five minutes, giving 400 words. Transcription time is 40 minutes, and the rulebook permits errors up to 5 per cent of the dictated words. At the 22-minute mark she has typed 260 words with 7 errors. Her notebook contains 38 doubtful words: 21 are single outlines with vowels omitted, 11 are phrase outlines written at speed, and 6 are completely illegible. Two hundred words remain untranscribed. She types steadily at about 25 wpm and has already used 4 minutes for reading back. She must leave 5 minutes for final proofreading. The invigilator has warned that omitted words count as errors, and that a blank is never treated as a neutral omission.
1. Calculate the maximum number of errors she may still incur, and determine whether leaving all 38 doubtful words blank is survivable.
Read the worked answer
Error budget. 5% of 400 = 20 errors. She already has 7, so only 13 remain. If all 38 doubtful words are left blank, omissions alone add 38, giving 45 errors - a fail even if every typed word is perfect. Resolving 25 would leave 7 + 13 = 20, exactly at the limit with no cushion. She must recover at least 26 of the 38 to hold one error in reserve.
Time check. 200 words at 25 wpm = 8 minutes. With 5 minutes reserved for proofreading, only 5 minutes remain for 38 decisions - about 8 seconds each. Full vocalisation is impossible; she must use context and consonant skeletons, not re-read the whole passage.
Strategic conclusion. The arithmetic shows that the doubtful words, not typing speed, decide the result. She should type the remaining 200 words first at a steady pace, then spend the last 5 minutes on the highest-yield outlines; this preserves the 5-minute proofreading block and prevents a last-minute rush from creating fresh typing errors.
2. Which category of doubtful words should she resolve first, and what rule should guide a guess when an outline remains illegible?
Read the worked answer
Resolve the 21 single outlines first: the consonant skeleton plus sentence context gives the best recovery rate. Phrase outlines come second because a phrase may be recoverable from its first or last word. Completely illegible marks last.
When an outline stays unreadable, never leave a blank. A blank is a certain error; a contextually plausible guess is only a possible error and may be correct. Use the register of an office note - 'principal' before 'objection', 'board' before 'meeting' - and check grammar and collocation. Because only 13 errors remain, she can afford at most 13 wrong guesses; that means she must recover at least 25 by context and reserve guessing for the residue. The rule is not 'guess everything' but 'never accept a guaranteed omission when a reasoned guess has a chance'.