What speed is legal dictation in high court steno exams?

The official notices we checked set English shorthand for legal dictation at 100 to 120 words per minute. The Supreme Court of India's 2024 Court Master (Shorthand) post is the fastest, at 120 words per minute ¹. The Delhi High Court's 2024 Senior Personal Assistant test is at 110 ², and the Supreme Court's Personal Assistant post is at 100 ³. The speed is set by the post and the notice, so check the figure in the notice for your own exam.

The guide to legal dictation for shorthand and steno exams sets out the whole exam. This page covers only the speed. For a short definition of the term, see what legal dictation is.

Most notices we checked set English at 100 or 110 words per minute

Speed is the first figure to check, because it sets how fast the passage is read. The English figures in the notices we opened cluster at two levels. Two tests use 110 words per minute and two use 100, and the 120 figure appears once, in the Supreme Court's Court Master post.

The Delhi International Arbitration Centre is an arbitration body, not a High Court, so its row is included for comparison only. Goa's junior stenographer test, set by a state government, is also at 100 words per minute ⁶.

The Supreme Court sets three speeds for three posts

The Supreme Court's 2024 advertisement covers three posts, and each has its own English speed: 120, 110 and 100 words per minute. The same notice sets a separate typing test for the Court Master post ⁷, so a candidate for that post has two targets to meet. The speed differs between posts, so a candidate for the Personal Assistant post, whose test is 100 words per minute, should not set 120 as the target.

The Delhi High Court notice states the passage length

The Delhi High Court's 2024 Senior Personal Assistant test is the clearest High Court example we could open. It dictates a passage of 550 words ⁸. The Supreme Court notice does not state the passage length, so the Delhi figure is the one to use when you plan a practice session.

Speed is only one of three figures in the notice

A speed of 110 words per minute is not the whole test. The transcription time and the mistake limit decide the score, and the speed decides how much you have to write. The Supreme Court grading table takes off marks in steps, from full marks with no mistakes down to 50 percent for mistakes up to 5 percent ⁹. Read all three figures together, and plan for the one that you find hardest to meet in practice.

Notices from other courts could not be checked from our environment

Searches also returned notices from other High Courts, including Calcutta and Himachal Pradesh, that may set speeds of their own. We could not open those notices from our research environment, so we have not used their figures here. If your court is one of them, read its current notice before you plan, because speeds and time limits change between notices.

What to do

1. Find the scheme of examination for your post. The speed, transcription time and mistake limit are usually in the same table.
2. Plan to your post's speed, not the highest figure in the notice. The method for practicing legal dictation explains how to practice at that speed and count mistakes.
3. Check the mistake limit at that speed. A passage is only passed if the mistakes stay under the limit, so count them at the speed the exam sets.

For the shorthand systems behind these speeds, see how fast shorthand writing is. For the steno side, see how fast stenographers type.