Five minutes of prose, the length used for most professional typing assessments. It measures endurance as much as speed — and it is the most honest number you can get about how you type at work.
Five-minute tests are the standard in clerical and administrative hiring, court reporting programmes, medical transcription and most typing certifications. If you have been asked to prove a WPM figure, this is almost certainly the format the assessor has in mind. It is also the right choice if you type for long stretches — writers, support agents, anyone who spends the afternoon in a text box — because it exposes the fade that shorter tests hide.
Expect it to read lower than your one-minute score. A drop of ten to fifteen words per minute between the two is normal; a drop of more than twenty usually means fatigue or tension is setting in, and that the fix is technique rather than more speed drills.
Gross WPM is every five characters you type, including spaces, divided by five minutes. Net WPM subtracts one word for every uncorrected error left in the text. Because five minutes of typing contains a lot of characters, small accuracy differences move the net figure a long way: at 60 WPM gross, ten uncorrected errors cost you two full words per minute.
Corrected errors are not penalised in the final number, but they are not free either — the seconds spent on backspace come straight out of your gross speed. The rhythm score catches this: a run with many corrections shows up as an uneven line even when the net accuracy looks fine.
Run this test a few times over a week rather than five times in an evening. Your speed on a long test is limited by how automatic your weakest keys are, and that changes with sleep, not with repetition in a single sitting. Between tests, practise the drill the coach generates — it targets the transitions that slowed you, which is where the next few words per minute live.
On the day, sit so your forearms are level, keep the text at eye height, and read a few words ahead of where you are typing. The passage here is ordinary English prose with normal punctuation, which is what assessments use; if your job is code, medical notes or legal drafting, the domain tests below measure the vocabulary you will actually be assessed on.