I’ll walk you through the PatExam Engine in this tutorial.

The PatExam Engine is Step 3 of the patent bar review program. In this step, you’ll answer practice exam questions.

If you click through then you’ll see there’s an MPEP download page. This page will have all the files for the MPEP. These are the same files you’ll have access to the day of your exam. You can also get these from the USPTO website if you’d prefer. You can download these so you have them on your computer for lookup. I suggest putting them in a folder in order. You can also open them from this page, whatever is easiest for you.

Then you’ll start out by reviewing the MPEP Search Strategy tutorial. It’s also within the tutorial mini-course.

This tutorial helps you search the MPEP and gives you pointers for test day. You cannot look everything up so it gives you tips for how to think about searching.

Now you’re ready to start answering practice questions from our PatExam Engine!

I want to point out a big misconception with the Patent Bar exam and reviewing old exam questions. Basically, you cannot expect to pass this exam by memorizing these (or any other question bank) of exam questions.

Taking the practice exam questions is valuable and well worth your time, but please don’t be fooled into thinking that’s all you need to do to pass the exam.

It’s best if you start with the topic exams. At any given time, we usually offer about 550 current practice exam questions. To get to them you’ll back out to the dashboard again and see mini-courses labelled 5-star topics, 4-star topics, etc …

The topics are organized by a 5-star system. This way you can see the heaviest tested topics (those with 5-stars) and the lowest likely to be tested topics. This will help you know where to spend the most time, but you should aim to take all the topic practice exams.

All 550 questions are within the topic exams where they are all organized by topic.

Answering the questions by topic helps you focus on which topics you need to spend more time in. In addition, you can answer the questions faster because for many of the topics you only need to open one MPEP file.

So here, let’s click on 5-star topics. As you can see a topic like 35 USC 102 is heavily tested. A lot of these in the 5-star category will take you longer to complete because they have more questions. But there are much shorter exams. Some topics only have a couple of questions.

We have all this accounted for in our study plans so you can definitely follow the study plan suggestions or take the exams in whatever order you would like. Ideally, you will go through them all, but if you don’t have enough time you’ll have to decide what works best for you.

Once you’ve decided on a topic, click on the link for that topic.

I clicked on the prior art topic. Next we can click on start quiz.

The topic exams are not timed and they provide you with immediate feedback. So here, you can see whether you got it wrong or right along with an explanation right after you selected your answer.

Now you’ll find as you go through these questions that many practice questions cover more than one topic. That’s part of what makes this exam so difficult. One question isn’t dedicated to one topic. Although they’re organized by a heading, you may have to open up more than one MPEP chapter if you want to look the material up. That’s part of the reason why even though the exam is open book, you won’t have time to look much up.

You are in charge of whether or not you complete an exam. I don’t suggest marking it off as complete unless you got 70% or 80% or above. And again, you’re taking these with no time limit and are here to learn so your threshold may be higher. Keep in mind, the more effort you put into your preparations, the more likely you are to pass the exam.

We suggest working through all the practice exams by topic.

Once you’ve completed the topic exams you will want to try the Exam Simulator.

You will get 50 random questions pulled from our question bank and 3 hours to answer them. You’re not shown feedback as you answer the questions. The time constraints are the same as the actual exam.

I do want to point out that the look and feel of our simulator is not identical to that of the one you’ll have on exam day, but it is similar. The colors are not the same. The box is not the same size. The position of the timer and other features are also not the same.

However, the actual Prometric computerized exam format is very similar. I cannot imagine that anyone would have a hard time navigating it. Essentially, you are shown one question at a time and you mark your answer from the answer choices. Then you move onto the next question. You can mark questions and go back to them. We offer the same features. So it’s not much different.

I also want to point out once again that you will see new questions on your real exam. So you cannot just memorize our question bank of 550 questions and expect to pass the exam. You will see new questions.

You will see more complex questions in some cases that we cannot anticipate. So after you’ve attempted all the questions organized by topic and then tried a few simulators, the usefulness of taking more of our exams starts to fade. We have clients who won’t stop taking the exams until they can answer every question right, but after a while, it is better to go back to the Guidebooks.

It is better to do a final review with the guidebooks. Keep track of what’s difficult for you and review that. Also look at the ratings and make sure to spend extra time learning material from heavily tested chapter and sections.

I highly suggest doing that instead of taking dozens of simulator exams. Again, the usefulness will start to fade once you’re just answering questions based on memory. And again you will see more some more complex questions so you need to be prepared for that and reviewing the Guidebooks is the best way to do that.

With enough review of the material in the Guidebooks and taking the practice exams you will hopefully have no trouble passing the real exam!