Thursday, August 04, 2011 The results are in!

Today, the EQE preparation season officially started again. The results of the EQE 2011 have been published on the EPO website. I'd like to congratulate the 190 first time sitters (38.78%) who were so successful that they are now entitled to put the words 'European Patent Attorney' in their e-mail signature. Many other candidates also passed one or more papers and are therefore also coming closer to this coveted title.

Looking at the statistics, I can see that the difficulty level of the C paper of 2011, as expected, was comparable to that of last year. In 2010, 39% of all candidates passed the C paper and 11% scored a compensable fail. For this year, the respective percentages were 37% and 10%. It is to be noted that first time sitters score significantly higher marks than resitters. 51% of all first time sitters scored more than half of the available marks. 11% scored between 45 and 49.

The D paper of 2011 has turned out to be a very difficult one. The pass rate for all candidates (50 marks or more) dropped from 43% in 2010 to only 30% in 2011.

For everyone who, unfortunately, did not pass this year's C exam, we do of course have some nice methodology courses and exam training. This year also in some very interesting European cities like Rome, Warsaw and Istanbul. Visit our website for more information about these and other courses.

Friday, March 04, 2011 EQE C 2011: a solution

Ok. This is my solution. Please note that this is just my provisional opinion. I didn't write down any of the attacks, but just went through the annexes to find features and arguments. All the notes I made are in the margins of the exam paper.

If you don't agree with me, please let me know. If you use the comment option of this blog, please choose some identity. It is difficult to discuss with multiple persons having the name Anonymous simultaneously. Of course, you can also send me an e-mail if you don't want to talk about this in public.

Again: This is just a solution provided by some tutor who thinks that he doesn't need to use six hours and empty paper to make the exam. The real solution will not be available until the compendium comes out (August 2011). You can still pass this exam if you do not have the same attacks and you can also fail having the same attacks.

Claim 1:	A6+A2
Claim 2(1):	A6+A2+A3
Claim 3:	Nov.A5(54(3)), Nov.A6
Claim 4:	Nov.A5(54(3)), Nov.A6
Claim 5(4):	A6+A4
Claim 6(5), 2gr:	Art.123(2), (A6+A4)
Claim 6(5), 4gr:	A6+A4
Claim 7(4):	Nov.A5(54(3)), Nov.A6
Claim 8:	A3+A4 A4+A3

Friday, March 04, 2011 EQE C 2011: reading the claims

At DeltaPatents, we always advise our candidates to start the C paper with reading the claims carefully. Of course that's also the first thing I did after printing the paper.

My first observations:

• 8 claims = a lot of attacks
  
• Many strange words, that are probably explained in the description and/or other annexes. Fin, corrugated, flux, brazing, manganese.
  
• Claim 1: What kind of protrusions? What function? What length is desired? Such features are often attackable using prior art features that are quite different from the preferred embodiments that you find in the description and figures of A1.
  
• Claim 2: Nothing special.
  
• Claim 3: Product by process. The attack on claim 1 will work again (if there are no priority problems). Probably, an additional attack will be expected. I am expecting to find a different manufacturing process in the prior art (known or obvious) leading to the same product (no technical difference).
  
• Claim 4: Product by process again. The process step clearly has a technical effect. The claimed product comprises a joint, brazing alloy and flux (but I still have no idea how and why).
  Entirely different claim category. Probably a different closest prior art document.
  
• Claim 5: Sort of product by process ('pre-coated')
  
• Claim 6: Strange claim. Not a range is claimed, but two single points. I just hope not to find a prior art embodiment having 3 g/m² of zinc.
  Why do they use the word 'provides' and not 'comprises'?
  
• Claim 7: Why would the heat exchanger of claim 4 not be suitable for use with these fluids? I expect an easy attack.
  
• Claim 8: Different claim category again. I expect some prior art that has nothing to do with heat exchangers.
  When does a tube have a planar surface? And for what reason?
  

Ok. That's a lot of questions and remarks for now. I will now start reading the client's letter and the description of A1. I am not going to give away my full analysis of the paper in this blog, but in the coming weeks some interesting topics will certainly be discussed here.

Friday, March 04, 2011 The day after

It's almost 24 hours after the start of the exam. Most of the candidates will be exhausted and probably took a day off to get some rest. For those candidates that cannot resist the temptation to search for 'the' solution to the C paper, I have one question: Could any candidate please send me the paper?

Update: I received a copy via mail. Thanks!

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 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.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010 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)

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 Ranges and purposive selection

Amongst candidates for the EQE C paper of 2010 a lot of discusion is going on about how to attack the ranges in claims 4 and 5. Is it possible to do a novelty attack or do we need inventive step (workshop modification, equivalent alternative or maybe a second document). Today I will give you some advice about how to deal with ranges in the exam (in your daily patent work, you should do the same).

The situation in the exam was as follows:
- Claim 4: 1 mm - 3 mm
- Claim 5(4): less than 1.8 mm (thus 1 mm - 1.8 mm)
- A3: 0.1 mm - 20 mm, 0.5 mm - 2.5 mm and 1.5 mm - 2 mm
- A4: 0.1 mm - 20 mm
- A6: 0.1 mm - 4 mm, 0.9 mm - 4 mm and 0.1 (and/or 0.9) mm - 2 mm

The relevant part of the Guidelines is GL C-IV 9.8 (ii) which gives three criteria for considering a sub-range selected from a broader numerical range to be novel.