Editing Manual of Patent Examining Procedure

The '''Manual of Patent Examining Procedure''' (MPEP) is a manual published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office that is used by patent examiners. The MPEP contains the procedures and rules of patent examining (as the name implies). The manual is very large, encompassing thousands of pages of text.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office registration examination, also known as the "patent bar" is entirely based upon the MPEP. The main requirement to sit for the patent bar is bachelor's degree in certain science or technical field. Alternatively, one could qualify to sit for the patent bar by taking a certain number of credit hours of certain college science courses.

Because the MPEP is so large and practically all of it is theoretically fair game, preparing for the patent bar can be a daunting task. Patent bar preparation courses are widely available to help with the task. Most patent bar prep courses provide MPEP summaries, and instructions on how to prepare for the patent bar. These courses are necessary because there is almost no way to assimilate such a vast amount of information.

Commercially available patent bar preparation courses are not cheap, however. There have been no alternatives to paying for the courses if one wants to pass the patent bar.

Until now. Wiki Law School is now hosting a MPEP Outline project where folks may help to create an MPEP outline. To begin, we simply imported raw text from the MPEP into our wiki. Now, you can help us by going through the sections and delete unnecessary text, summarizing the necessary text, and formatting the outlines to look nice.

We also have a page titled [[Patent Bar Preparation]], which will contain study schedules, tips, and anything else that the Wiki Law School contributors deem important for test preparation.

While this project still has a long way to go, we eventually hope to be a complete test preparation course that only costs you your internet bill.

The best part? While you are combing through the MPEP, you will learn both the layout (very important for the test) and the content of the MPEP. You will get more out of this than what you put in.

To begin looking through our MPEP Outline, go to the [[MPEP Table of Contents]] or search for specific MPEP chapters in the search box on the left (use the format "MPEP X" where "X" is the chapter number to search--for example, "MPEP 2100").