The Patent Bar Exam Format
The Patent Bar exam consists of two sections, an AM and a PM, each containing fifty multiple-choice questions. You will have an hour break in which to eat your lunch in between these two sections. You may not bring anything into the exam with you, not even a watch. You will receive a pencil and scratch paper at the beginning of each section, which will be taken away at the end of each section. You will have access to an electronic, searchable PDF formatted MPEP while taking the exam. This MPEP can be used to look up the answers to questions to which you do not recall. The search function provided is Acrobat Reader 5.0, which is provided with this course, and is equivalent to the "Find" function in the most current Acrobat Reader. Using an electronic MPEP can be slow and awkward unless you have practiced using it many times. Thus, while taking our full-length exams, it is imperative that you practice look-ups using our searchable electronic PDF version of the MPEP.

You must answer 70% of the questions on the exam correctly in order to pass the Patent Bar exam. Ten of the questions on each exam are experimental and do not count towards your score. Thus, you must answer 68 of the remaining 90 questions correctly in order to pass the Patent Bar exam. Unfortunately, you will likely not be able to tell which of the exam questions are real and which are experimental. Therefore, in reality, you must answer 70 questions correctly to give yourself some cushion in passing the exam. Some of the questions can be answered in less than a minute, other questions require more time, but on average, in order to pass, you need to be on a 3 minute per question pace. If you do enough practice exams to achieve that intuitive, three-minute per question average pace, and keep to that pace on the exam, you will pass. Given that our course now contains 90% of all questions seen on the patent bar exam, you should have no problem answering the required 68 questions needed to pass the exam.

MPEP Lookup Strategies
A Many students swear by the Table of Contents as the best place to search for a topic when looking up a question you are unsure of. Others feel that 37 CFR is the best place to lookup answers. We feel that the best approach is to memorize the MPEP chapter subheadings for each chapter, so that you have a clear idea of what each chapter covers and where to look in relation to each of the subsections in a particular chapter. To that end we have developed our MPEP Search Strategy, which you will be introduced in week 3.

Essential Exam Strategies
A major cause of failure on the exam a refusal to abandon a question to which an answer cannot be easily found. REMEMBER, YOUR GOAL IS TO ANSWER 70 QUESTIONS ON THE EXAM CORRECTLY. If you try to answer all of the questions on your first pass through, you won't finish, and if you don't finish, you won't pass. Often you will be 90% sure than one answer is correct. It is tempting to go into your MPEP to confirm that you are right. Instead, make a note that you want to check the answer at the end and move on. The computer will allow you to flag questions and to return to them later. Additionally, you have to put off the hard questions on each section until the end, to make sure that you answer all of the easier questions, and you have to give up on questions when your electronic MPEP look-up is not yielding any results.

At the end of each exam section (AM and PM), with the 30 minutes that you have remaining from your 3 minute per question pace, go back and make sure to have put an answer for every question on that section. This can be done by guessing intelligently, because this is not an exam that punishes guessing; it's an exam that rewards guessing. There are five possible answers to every multiple-choice question and two or three can usually be eliminated by the application of memorized facts that you have learned. Once you have narrowed the question down to two or three possible answer choices, choose the one that seems most correct and move on. Repeat this process for each question that you did answer on your first pass through until every question has been answer.

The '00-'03 Exams
Finally, you must practice recognizing old exam questions and knowing what the correct answer is for each under the current MPEP Rules and Procedures. This is particularly true of the questions contained in the '00-'03 Exams. The repeat questions from these exams can yield you up to 40 questions on the exam, and when combined with our Question Bank and Exam Question/Topic Posts, will ensure that you pass the patent bar exam with plenty of time to spare!