Cheating at TypeRacer was sort of like slacking off in your 7th grade typing class. It was easy to get away with it, but you were really just cheating yourself out of all that free time other kids had in high school and college while you were trying to get your essay typed at night. I know because I was there.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) for the slackers, cheating at TypeRacer has just become a lot harder. Starting today, everyone who gets a score higher than 100 wpm has to pass a typing test to prove that they are a fast typist. The test asks you type not less than 20 wpm below the score you achieved in the race. If you fail the test your score for the race doesn’t count. If you pass, you are cleared to type 20 wpm faster than your test score without having to take the test again.
For example, say I finish a race at 110 wpm – I would have to get a score of at least 90 wpm on the typing test. If I get, say, 98 on the test, then I’m cleared to type up to 118 wpm in all future races. If I then get lucky and type 119 in some future race, I’d have to take the test again and score at least 99 wpm on it.
Truthfully though, I only type 60 wpm, and if you’re like me, you will never actually get to see the new typing test; so here is a screenshot.
The test asks you to type a randomly-generated Star Trek plot summary from an image. Having the text in an image means that the tricks cheaters had been using no longer work. I know some of you are reading this and thinking “OCR.” Sure, but if we see people doing that, we’ll just distort the text like a CAPTCHA, so, alluding to Star Trek, “resistance is futile!”
Once TypeRacer gets permanent user accounts your typing test score will be saved permanently. Until then, you’ll have to take the typing test every time you log in and finish a race faster than 100 wpm. We apologize to all our fast typists for this temporary inconvenience, and assure you that permanent user accounts are coming soon.
So now you’ll be able to see how fast people really type. Tonight, for instance, I’m seeing that “Chrozlol” has the top score of 152 wpm. Very impressive! Let’s see if anyone can beat that. The world’s fastest typist, Mrs. Barbara Blackburn, set a world record of 212 wpm. Perhaps the next world record will be set on TypeRacer!
TypeRacer Blog 
This is awesome.
I just came across TypeRacer, and it is exactly what I’ve been looking for after getting over my addiction to “MagicPen.” And this addiction is actually useful in my everyday life!
I have one suggestion: allow me to find strangers to race against and chat with them afterward. Also, let me pick races that have X amount of people at X average speed, to see if I can compete head-to-head with the biggest boys!
It’s great that there’s a safeguard against cheating now, but the safeguard itself is unfair sometimes. Some quotes just have shorter words than others. I usually get around 85~95, but I managed to pull off 123 wpm on the Pink Floyd “Time” quote. I felt pretty proud of that, but then it threw the Star Trek quote at me and demanded at least 103 wpm, which I just couldn’t manage because the words were so much longer.
I guess if the intent is to cancel out scores from the easier quotes, it’s effective, but if the only thing the safeguard is meant to do is prevent cheating, it runs a high risk of frustrating users.
The safeguard is nice, but i have found a way around it. Surely would stop alot of others from cheating.
Well on the other note i am sorry for ruining the game for others, i wont be playing it anymore.
Typeracer is a really nice project!
Hats off to whoever is working on it.
At least make the test quote readable. As it stands, it’s an incomprehensible mish-mash of Star Trek words that (even for the Trekkie in me) is impossible to type fast due to its lack of proper grammar. It’s not even a real sentence! When I (and some others) type fast, we understand the sentence as a whole. Giving us a disjointed slurry that our brains spend time struggling to comprehend is like telling us to reproduce a Jackson Pollock painting.
This is good… But needs tweeking. I just
scored 111 on a race, it made me take the
other test, I got 97 wpm with 95% accuracy
(didn’t complete it) and it told me I failed.
How does that work?
The safeguard is a bit bizarre. I just typed 132 wpm in my first race since it was added, then typed 110 wpm in the safeguard test. But of course that’s 2 wpm too slow apparently. I would have passed if the timer hadn’t started right away, before I even knew what was going on.
I’m not sure why it keeps asking me to take the test after each of my races. I’m logged in through Orkut. I’ve passed the test several times now yet it keeps making me retake it.
I just typed a quote from Paul Graham’s book at 136wpm (my personal best), but I couldn’t pass the test. I don’t care about having it on the board, but I’d like to have it counted in my average speed.
This is the fourth time I got a speed faster than 120wpm but couldn’t pass the test to have it counted. The typing test just has too many long, weird words in ungrammatical sentences to be able to finish as fast as the quotes I can type the fastest.
Also, why would accuracy determine whether you pass or not? Presumably a cheater would have 100% accuracy every time. Actually, it seems to me that making errors should be an indicator that the typist is a human.
Your fucking safeguard test is a joke. Shame on the person that decided it would be best to use a bunch of ridiculous Star Trek names in a nonsensical sentences. You’re sir/madam, are fucking retarded and have forced me to lose a little bit of faith in humanity.
lol @ eaa. This is my impression of you: I HATE STAR TRACK!!!!!!!!!!!!! EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET IS GAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
On a serious note, the cheating protection doesn’t work, as we pretty much all know by now.
I am an ITRT for a public school system. I was so excited and thought teachers could use this in their classrooms, but after I saw some of the vulgar wording in the comment section, I knew I could not expose our students to this type of feedback. This is a shame! This would have been a great site to motivate students. Can you do anything to block obscene language?
Looks like our first attempt at the typing test failed – it was too easy to cheat still, and it was too hard for the legitimate typists. Thanks to everyone who expressed concern over this. We will be releasing an improved version today. Will post on the blog as soon as that’s ready.
“Well on the other note i am sorry for ruining the game for others, i wont be playing it anymore.”
You posted this on the 17th, now it’s the 18th, and you’re back at it again. You’re just a lame jerk. Please take your mad skr1pt sk1llz elsewhere. You know, like, doing something constructive. Apparently you’re bright enough; but you’re handicapped because you’re a doofus.
The same applies to the rest of you losers. Do it the hard way, or just don’t do it.
It’s obviously necessary to use a new random text for each test. Duh. I don’t have any trouble typing those texts at a reasonable speed. Actually the challenge is nice.
[…] are also changing the way the typing test works. (In case you missed our last post, we started asking everyone with a score of over 100 wpm to pass an “un-cheatable” typing […]
No matter who you are I’m better than you!
Cheating at on a typing test = you have no life.
Caring that people cheat on a typing test = you have negative life
I agree. Some people cheat a lot. I mean common 108 is taking it too far =)
i wish no one would cheat on these test i write at a 112 wpm
at a 112 wpm
pssssssssshhhhhhhhhh i always cheat on my typing test
YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CHEAT ON TYPING TESTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seriously dont cheat its real bad and what if some one was watching over you……
wat the heck ur supposed to cheat that how it goes!
Its real funny how losers cheat on there test and they
end up being bums in there life and i rock with a 102
wmp!
It is also funny how those cheaters can make more money than typists >:)
When will the accounts be ready?
120 wpm+ is very impressive if you ask me (I’m never going to be that good) but would hate to think that some of these scores have been obtained by cheaters!
I kinda wish there wasn’t so much liberal content in the tests. After completing a race, I saw it was taken from The Audacity of Hope….I had to go wash my hands afterwards. Is this application some kind of brainwashing tool used by Obama or what?
THIS TEST MAKES ME RAGE HARD. I make so many mistakes in typing, yet I delete them quickly and carry on.FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFfffffffffff couldn’t pass the test because I made too many mistakes basically.
Great. So my all time high score that was like 15 more than my previous won’t be counted >_> Thanks a bunch.
Haha. That’s a good idea, because in school (I’m in 8th grade and we had to do keyboardng last year) all we did was type random letters with spaces and the teacher didn’t even check to see if we were actually typing the words, he just looked at our perfect scores. 😀 Such cheaters…but I’m an okay typer (40-60) I think…
Sometimes when typing a pop up will stop my progress and I don’t see the point of continuing as it is not a true representation of my typing.
typeracer is the bomb
Type Racer is ofcourse a site where I can prove
my self as a Fastest typist on the record. But
there is a very big problem that when i cross
the speed limit of 100 then they ask for another
test in which the words are very long and we can
fail to prove our selves as a Best typist.
If you try to prevent cheating please find another s
solution for this….
Thanks
thats gay
Blah Blah………..
i am trying to type really fast because it is cool and i want people to think that i am the fastest typist in the world
i farted loudly
Moo. im a cow
Хм… спорно, поспорил бы с автором…
This is a http://www.typeracer.com. & This is awesome
well… see this
http://www.malwarehelp.org/hacking-researcher-cracks-yahoo-captcha-software-2008.html
Some of the paragraphs are really long and make my neck hurt but other than that im a fan
What about the scores already on texts from those who cheated? I recently typed a text and looked at the top ten and the first place score was over 300 with the name even saying learn how to cheat in it. It makes me pretty mad that I have no chance to make the top ten because someone cheated and put the score so high I can’t beat it without cheating too.
Hi Savannah,
Thanks for your post. Yes, we realize this is an issue. It’s already on my radar and I will be working on cleaning some of those out.
Please feel free to email me directly about any accounts that you believe are cheating, and include details about why you believe they are cheating. My address is david AT typeracer DOT com.
Thanks!
David Pritts
Typeracer
This really sucks. “The test asks you type not less than 20 wpm below the score you achieved in the race.” is a lie. I scored 107 wpm and it asked me to clear the test at 96 wpm. The captcha image took 4 seconds to load. Also it takes time to move the hand from keyboard to mouse and click the submit button. This is a really really bad way of conducting test!
So there’s nothing stopping someone who can actually type above 100 WPM, but not much higher?
The picture does not appear!!! I used both Safari and Chrome. Please check your system.
Hey!
I’ve tried to take this test but the image doesn’t show up and I don’t know what to do…help?