There is quite a bit of information covered in the MPEP. After all, it is a few thousand pages long. You can flail throughout its pages, spending hours in a chapter like Chapter 1000: “Matters Decided by Various U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Officials” if you wanted to. Or even spend an entire weekend covering Chapter 2400: “Biotechnology”.
Although these chapters are truly fascinating, they aren’t tested on the exam to a great extent. So is it a good idea to spend your limited time dissecting them just to be thorough? We don’t think so, as do many others who have successfully passed the exam. You need to know what is tested and spend your time learning that material.
Then, once you’ve received your Patent Practitioner’s certificate, feel free to spend your quiet afternoons reading through these other chapters for fun (OK, or perhaps not).
So here is some advice to get you started…
Based on careful statistics, the topics that you should know really well are:
- Claims (both general and writing)
- Rejections (general, 35 U.S.C. 101, 102 and 103)
- Types of Applications
- General Concept of Patentability
Just these four topics alone account for an average of about 40% of the questions on the exam.
Furthermore, statistics reveal that appeals, reissues, reexaminations, and PCT issues are each tested fairly heavily on the exam as well.
Therefore, you can probably expect about half the questions on your test to relate to the following topics alone:
- Claims – Chapter 600
- Rejections – Chapters 700 and 2100
- Application types – Chapter 200
- Patentability – Chapter 2100
- Appeals – Chapter 1200
- Reissues – Chapter 1400
- Reexaminations – Chapter 2200 & 2600
- PCT – Chapter 1800
Therefore, these 8 topics are the areas to spend some serious time on. And we’ve given you the Chapters you need to review to learn them (although between all of them, you’re probably looking at well over 1,000 pages to read).
Of course, many other topics will be tested on the exam, but if you really pay attention to these 8 topics, you should know about 50%* of the material that will be covered on the Patent Bar.
Remember, our Review Course can save you plenty more time. It includes an outlined, consolidated version of the MPEP (called the Guidebook to Patent Law). The Guidebook is full of key points, summaries and ‘at a glance tables’ that will help you master the tested material much easier than if you read through the MPEP on your own.
* Please note that while these statistics do tend to hold true, these are just averages. You may see more or less of any of these topics on your particular exam due to the nature of the computerized tests.
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