Examiner's Report

And finally, the Examiner's Report is published. Because I'm not longer in the luxurious position to have my answers corrected and marked by the Exam Committee, this is my first chance of checking how good (or bad) my own answers were.

First thing to look at (of course): Did I perform the correct attacks? To my relief, it turns out that I agree with the committee on most attacks. Only for claim 4 (plastics), I had chosen (and would probably still choose) something different.

The exam committee is of the opinion that merely stating that in a certain range an effect is attained to a (not further specified) greater extent than (at an unspecified distance) outside the range is sufficient for being novel, even if the prior art disclosing a broader range also tells you that the effect is attained to a greater extent. They might be correct, but I am very curious what a Board of Appeal would decide in such a situation. I would expect that more evidence, e.g. in the form of concrete values, would be needed for having a selection invention.

That this range was a difficult issue, was of course already known by the regular visitors of this website. The issue was already discussed extensively on this website in the weeks following the exam. Click here for the full discussion. Congratulations to the anonymous poster who bravely defended the exact opinion of the Exam Committee. I hope he or she passed this exam.

Second thing to look at: How did the candidates do? I was surprised by the lack of cynical remarks about 'stupid' candidates. There are also not many remarks about popular attacks that were not worth many marks. It is however clear that selecting the correct closest prior art is still one of the most important things to do, if you want to pass Paper C.

Interesting: Only 5 marks for legal issues.

The results are in!

As most candidates will already know, the EPO has changed its way of communicating the results of the EQE. Instead of a secure website where every candidate can find his own results after entering a password, they decided to make all results public. On the EPO-website you can find all results of all EQE candidates of 2010. Click here for all results.

And of course, we are exploiting this opportunity to do some statistical analysis. The first results for the C paper:
  • 1490 candidates handed in an answer and scored 1 mark or more
  • 735 candidates (49.3%) scored below 45
  • 167 candidates (11.2%) scored between 45 and 49
  • 588 candidates (39.5%) scored 50 or more. Congratulations to them!
  • The average number of marks was 45.

    (statistics updated on August 4, 2011)