A recent Wall Street Journal report delves into Gen Z's surprising lack of keyboard typing skills, featuring interviews with several individuals and revealing some startling statistics.
The article is kind of all over the place mixing high-school graduates and fourth-graders? I can see how you’re sluggish at typing in fourth grade… The numbers for a 17 year old would be interesting… But yeah, 13 words per minute isn’t impressive. And most young people I know use phones and tablets, not computers. So naturally a good amount of them isn’t good around these things.
Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)
On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.
That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.
The article is kind of all over the place mixing high-school graduates and fourth-graders? I can see how you’re sluggish at typing in fourth grade… The numbers for a 17 year old would be interesting… But yeah, 13 words per minute isn’t impressive. And most young people I know use phones and tablets, not computers. So naturally a good amount of them isn’t good around these things.
Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)
On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.
That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.