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Patent Bar Preparation
This article is currently a stub about how to prepare for the USPTO's admission to practice exam, commonly known as the patent bar. If you have any preparation tips or advice, please add them here.
General Study Strategy
You should plan on two main components to your course of study: practice tests and MPEP study. How much time you give to each depends on your personal preference. Each component is important but the practice exams probably is more so due to the fact that one could learn about the MPEP following the test review method described below.
Practice Exams
Find as many old patent bar exams as you can. Take the exams under similar test conditions (3 hours for each group of 50 questions). Do both sessions in a single day, with no more than a 1 hour between the sessions.
Reviewing the practice exams
This is the most important part of the study strategy. After finishing taking the exam under real test conditions, go through every single quesion, and look up the answer in the actual MPEP (not an outline or guidebook). Read the relevant MPEP section(s); figure out what it says and why the answer was what it was. Follow this method for every single question.
This method gives three important benefits:
- You will learn the layout of the MPEP chapters and sections;
- You will learn the material; and
- You will learn the questions know the correct answer when you see it in the exam (many questions are recycled).
NOTE: Some of the answers for the old exam questions may not agree with the current revision of the MPEP. This is why it is so important for you to review each question in the current MPEP revision (using the revision that you will be tested on, currently 8th ed. rev. 4). You need to know what the answer is now, not what it was seven years ago, etc., when that test was administered under an older edition of the MPEP.
MPEP Chapters
Some MPEP chapters are much more important for the patent bar than others. MPEP chapters can be separated into four tiers based on their relevance to the exam (starting at the most important chapters and listing in decending order of importance):
- Tier One - spend about 25% of your MPEP study time on these three chapters:
- Tier Two - spend about 50% of your MPEP study time on these chapters:
- Tier Three - Spend your remaining 25% of your MPEP study time on these chapters:
- Tier Four - Don't spend any time on these chapters other than a very brief review:
