It’s Official: The Date is Set for the Patent Bar Exam
It’s finally actually official: I’m taking the Patent Bar. Yesterday at work I got a letter from the USPTO telling me my application to sit for the exam has been accepted, and I needed to make an appointment with Prometric to take the exam at one of their local testing centers as soon as possible. So that’s what I did. I used Prometric’s website to sign up, and the whole process was fairly simple end-to-end, although I briefly panicked when the website asked for an identification-code that I hadn’t noticed was at the top of the letter from the USPTO.
By now, the testing centers near where I live don’t have a whole lot of openings, so I didn’t get the best possible date, but that’s the price of procrastination. I’ll be taking the exam on Wednesday, December 14th. The 13th and 14th were the earliest available days in December at the nearest testing center, and I’ll be out of town for the last 10 days of the month, so it really wasn’t much of a choice, but it was a large relief knowing that I don’t have to wait until January to take the test despite my delinquency in applying.
So, I have a test date and I’ve paid all of the fees. Now I just need to ensure I can pass the test. To that end, I’ll continue studying six days per week and take a few more simulated exams on weekends. Lately I have been narrowing my focus to one or two PRG Patent Bar Review course sections at a time. For example, I spent a few hours over a few evenings answering questions only from Section 19, Rights and Procedures Under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. I started out getting most of the questions wrong, but I got used to how the questions were asked and what they were actually asking. By the second time through the questions, I was getting a large majority correct (mainly due to actually knowing and being able to answer the question rather than just remembering the answer from the first time I saw it).
I find ExamWareTM very helpful in deciding which section to answer questions from because it keeps track of how many questions I have answered correctly/incorrectly as well as the number of questions in each section I have not yet seen. So, to choose the next section to tackle, I consider how many I’ve answered correctly/incorrectly as well as how many questions in the section I haven’t seen and how important the section is relative to the others.
I’ll get a clearer idea of the effectiveness of this strategy soon when I take another simulated exam. My goal is to be getting 85%+ on simulated exams before the actual testing date, so it will be interesting to see where I am relative to that goal.
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