gravity wrote:hey rhit, how did you study the patbar.com material?
right now, i'm just going through the manual 4 and manual 2, working through the chapters...
afterwards, i plan to look through the other book (post curriculum?) and take a few practice exams..
is that good enough? do i have to learn to look up the MPEP?
I spent quite a bit of time studying (about 2 hours a night during the week and 4-5 hours each day on the weekends for about 2.5 months). Having said that I don’t think I really needed to study nearly that much.
My technique was to read through each lesson and then sit down and immediately listen to the lecture while reading along. I read each lesson to get a general understanding of the material and then I listened to force me to understand each sentence and detail because I tend to subconsciously glaze over sections when reading in my head. The lecture was slow and boring but it made sure I noticed and processed each piece of information. Then I completed the questions associated with each lesson. For any question I missed (or guessed on) I went back through the MPEP so find the correct answer or verify why I guessed right.
After completing all 63? Lessons I moved on to reading through the post curriculum book to refresh all the topics from early in my studying and provide another instance of reinforcement to help me remember.
Finally, I started going through the computerized exams and only started only allowing myself to look stuff up in the computerized MPEP. These were a confidence boost because I would have passed every time.
As far as searches in the MPEP … yes you need to be comfortable using it. I was completing practice exams in 2 hours per section during practice but with the added stress of the actual exam I used the full 3 hours per section. The only reason I was able to finish was I had used the MPEP (both hardcopy and computerized) enough that I had a feel for where topics were covered. While the index is useful it is also helpful to have a basic knowledge of where the details of different topics are covered.
The best way I found to practice MPEP searches is to just take practice questions and find the topics related to the correct and incorrect answers. On the exam you just have to be good at finding the one sentence buried among several pages that gives the piece of information you are interested in. Using old exam questions for search practice also allows you to start to see how the information is buried and how the question and answers provide extra search words to try and narrow where to look.
On the test day be prepared for a long and hard day. I felt the day was more exhausting than the LSAT because you had to be on your game for almost 6 hours straight. Also you will likely be the only person taking the patent bar that day (I was) so you will see people come and go taking other random exams that last 45 minutes to a couple hours. I was the only person that had anything involving a morning and afternoon section. Also I advise you to maybe call ahead to your test center and determine what temperature their testing room generally is. My room was easily 80 degrees because it was a closed room with 25 computers pumping out heat. As the day went on it got hotter and hotter (that could have also just been the stress).
Thanks!!
