All of the questions on the USPTO Patent Bar Exam are sourced from material contained within the MPEP or supplementary bulletins.  You will be responsible for:

1) Knowing and/or

2) Being able to look up (it’s an open book exam).

Notice we said “knowing and/or being able to look up.”  We’ll get into this point later.  Sadly, a lot of test-takers get swamped into thinking they have to know everything about the MPEP.  Then because the MPEP is 3000 pages, they waste time and energy studying the wrong things (and studying the wrong way), and many of them do not pass the first time taking the exam.

The patent bar exam is a 100 Multiple Choice Question exam (with 5 answer choices per question).

It is 6 hours long comprised of two 3hr session with a one-1hr optional break in the middle.   You will get 3 hours to answer 50 questions in the morning, and another 3 hours to answer another 50 questions after the optional break.

A minimum score of 70 is required to pass the exam, and you will be shown a preliminary pass/fail as soon as you complete the exam.  If you have failed, you will be shown your score and given instructions for the review session and how to reschedule your exam should you choose.  If you pass, you will only be told that “you have passed.”

• Currently on every exam you will see 10 questions that are not counted/scored.  These are “beta” questions that the USPTO is trying out on you.  However, you will not know or be told which questions these are.  Thus, your exam is really only 90 scored questions (which means you need to get 63/90 right).
• It might be simpler to always think “I need 70 correct” out of 100 to pass, as you probably won’t know which questions are the unscored questions on your exam.  But, knowing that there are 10 questions that don’t count against you can help.  For example, if you get every single “beta” question wrong… you could still end up with a 100% pass!  Just keep that tucked in your mind in case you think on exam day “man, there were about 20 questions I didn’t know anything about.”  Odds are, after using our study materials, that probably a good number of those questions were beta questions.