Critical race-free internal-state assignments can be found by several methods. Often these methods produce several assignments for the same flow table. New and improved tests are presented that can be used to select that assignment which is most likely to produce a set of simple design equations. These tests are applicable to the next-state equations as well as the output equations. The tests are applicable to circuits that are to be realized with NAND gates or set-reset (SR) flip-flops. Another advantage of these tests is that they allow comparison between state assignments with differing numbers of internal-state variables.