Program Overview
Who Should Enroll in PassPatentBar?
An engineer or scientist may become a Registered Patent Agent entitled to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) by applying for and passing a Patent Bar Examination that has been developed and is administered by the USPTO. The same examination is also given to attorneys (with technical backgrounds) who want to become Registered Patent Attorneys.
Both Registered Patent Agents and Registered Patent Attorneys have the same status of Patent Practitioners when interacting with the USPTO. However if a patent matter goes beyond the USPTO to a U.S. Court, only a Registered Patent Attorney is qualified to carry on the prosecution
The need for both technologists and attorneys to serve as Patent Practitioners is conveyed here with a touch of humor:
The Patent Bar Examination
The Bar Examination consists of 100 multiple choice questions and it is normally taken in a single day with 50 questions to be answered during a 3-hour morning test session and the remaining 50 questions during a 3-hour afternoon session.
Each multiple choice question has five possible answers. And all of the answers can be found in source materials that are made available by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Significantly, the Bar Examination is an “open book” exam. All of the source materials are made available during the exam in a searchable format. However, it is extremely unlikely that anyone could receive a passing grade of 70% correct answers, or higher, without investing approximately 100 to 150 hours to master the content of the source materials and without acquiring efficient test taking skills.
The PassPatentBar Program
PassPatentBar has been developed to efficiently assist the student to pass the Patent Bar Exam. A series of well developed teaching modules guide a student through approximately 3,000 pages of source materials made available from the USPTO with the steady hand of a well informed professor. Since the objective is to pass the actual Patent Bar Exam, the teaching modules contain and explain numerous example questions.
It is worth mentioning here that PassPatentBar provides all enrolled students with a unique and powerful tool to cut through the 3,000 pages of source materials that are often repetitious and irrelevant to passing the bar exam. Careful editing by the PassPatentBar staff has produced a yellow highlighted version of the source materials to focus attention on the relevant sections that comprise about 10% of the 3,000 pages. This tool will save many hours of frustration.
And a new feature has been added to the current E9 version of the MPEP using special blue highlighting on top of the yellow to rivet attention on key sentences that pertain to known patent bar questions or likely future questions.
The training materials are all up to date reflecting major changes to patent laws and rules related to the America Invents Act (AIA). This includes the historic change to grant a patent to the First Inventor to File rather than the traditional First Person to Invent. This change went into effect on March 16, 2013.
After the student has completed the teaching modules, he/she is then directed to the task of passing examinations that closely simulate the actual Patent Bar Exam. To accomplish this, PassPatentBar has assembled a Question Bank of nearly 1000 questions that can be drawn upon to prepare 50 randomly selected questions into a series of training tests that are administered in 3-hour increments. The USPTO uses a similar testing strategy, randomly drawing questions from their extensive question bank.
As a student completes a sequence of simulated tests and learns the techniques and tips offered by PassPatentBar, overall knowledge will increase along with his/her testing scores.
When scores are consistently above the 70% passing threshold, the student will be ready to apply to take the actual Patent Bar Exam.
For those interested in further information about the PassPatentBar program, you may take a tour to sample the training materials that are made available to enrolled students by clicking on the selection tab Training Tour.
Taking the Actual Patent Bar Exam
Once the USPTO accepts an application, the actual exam must be scheduled within a 90-day period (see instructions for scheduling tests and test locations on the selection bar Locations for Bar Exam).
During this 90-day period, the student should continue to take additional simulated tests to improve his/her score into the range of 84% or above. At that point the student will have achieved such a high level of performance that PassPatentBar offers a money back guarantee of passing the actual Bar Examination.