Studying with ExamWare™
Today’s post will be a little bit brief, but the reasons for this serve to illustrate some of the complicating factors in studying for the Patent Bar while working and raising a child. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my wife works a couple nights each week and I watch our son those nights. Last night was one such night. I put the boy to bed at the usual time and began to write the post. Unfortunately, his internal clock is still a little off after his recent trip to Arizona to visit family, so he woke up just one short hour later and, even though he was clearly exhausted, refused to go back to sleep for another hour and a half. When he finally did succumb to sleepiness it was well past my bedtime, too, so the blog post remains as you see it and I got no studying done last night.
Over the last week I have concentrated my efforts on section 102 primarily by going over the slides from the review course as well as watching the course videos (even though the video is from a different week than when I took it, it is remarkably similar because Paul is very consistent with the way he teaches the course). I have also answered a few questions on ExamWare™.
The first time I tried ExamWare™, I left it on the default settings and answered questions randomly pulled from all of the subject matter. I surprised myself with how many I got correct, though to be fair there were a couple of easy ones such as an ethics-based question that was intended to ensure that prospective patent agents know not to lie to their clients. Doing well on the first try, however, was probably a bad thing because it is much too early to start thinking “I’m getting the hang of this, that Brad is crazy with his recommendation of 120 hours of studying - he’s just being overly cautious,” or anything else along those lines.
I say this especially because the next time I answered some questions, I set the ExamWare™ to select questions relating to sections 102 and 103. I did not fare quite as well, to say the least. That will probably be good in the long run, however, by serving as a nice kick in the pants for me to study every night and stick to the plan of learning the material, answering ExamWare™ questions and learning to navigate the MPEP. The good news is there is still time and the bad news is that I still have a long way to go.
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