When you sit down at your work station to start the exam, you will first be presented with this tutorial. You are alloted 15 minutes to view the tutorial. Since you will have already viewed the tutoral in advance of your exam day, you will want to use some of this time to make an answer sheet template. You will need to make 2 of these, one for the morning session and a second for the afternoon. It should take about 4 minutes to write each answer sheet template in the scratch paper booklet provided by the test center.

The Basics

With the template you can now track questions and answers:

Negative and Positive Questions

If you subscribe to this site, as you take a simulated exam, you will come across questions which are ecentially True or False questions. The questions may ask something like ...

• ...which answer is in accord with the patent rules and proceedures of the MPEP?
• Which is a proper reply?
• Which is not required?
• Which action would not be a proper rejection by the examiner?
• All of the following are proper except

Here is just one example of a deceptive negative question.

As you review your answers from the practice questions you are likely to find several questions which you answered incorrectly, not from not knowing the material, but rather from missing the proper True/False/not True/not False context of the question. Tracking them on the answer sheet template as shown below can help you avoid this mistake.

Search Strategy

Let's imagine that you reach the end of the morning session of the exam. You have 15 questions that you would like to look up, but there are only 10 minutes left. Where do you spend your effort during these last minutes?

You need a strategy to prioritise your question search. This should be based upon:

• The difficulty of the look-up.
  • Do you know where to find the answer?
  • Will you need to search the index first?
  • Do you have to search in several chapters?
• How sure you are of the answer.
  • Are you sure the answer is either D or E?
  • ...or do you have no idea on this question?
• Look-up consolidation.
  • Can you look-up multiple questions in the same chapter?

Many have found success with the method below:

One Last Example

So, when your all done you would have something that looks like answer 15:

• Which is not in proper accord with practice & proceedure as indicated in the MPEP? (False)
• I have no idea (1)
• But I know it's not B (/)
• I think it's A or D (_)
• so I'll mark one of these in case I run out of time
• I will have to look it up (square box)
• It will be easy to look up (E)
• because this question is about the death of an inventor and I remember the memory aid...
• ..."Death by Formula 409" (picture the squirt bottle as a gun)
• so I know exactly where to look, (409)
• I find that the answer is A (O)
• And I'm done with Question 15, answered correctly (X)