Advice for first-time sitters
I still remember how overwhelming and stressful it was to start preparing for the 4 main exams simultaneously. So now, my advice would be to stagger your preparation — introduce new exams gradually (every 2-3 weeks or so) instead of diving into all four at once.
Thinking about this advice I have quickly realised that like me, other EQE-qualified attorneys might have their own important tips for EQE candidates.
So, I have asked others on LinkedIn:
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone sitting the EQE for the first time?
What’s something you wish someone had told you when you started preparing for the main exams?
Before you read the tips, let’s stop for a second, because there is no EQE blog post without a disclaimer. :)
So, the disclaimer this time: I don’t necessarily agree with all the tips below. Of course, I will not comment on each of them, I will simply highlight my favourite ones. (Before anyone overthinks; the fact that I have not highlighted something does not automatically mean that I disagree.)
I have separated the tips coming from different people with lines.
First tip: Buy and watch all the videos from Fillun! I am serious: Your video on C-2021 saved my paper C. This year (2024), we had the exact same situation as in 2021, where a range in a claim had support in the description, but the support spanned over two paragraphs. Of these paragraphs, the first paragraph had a different effective date than the second paragraph. You explained this situation very well in your video, which I watched some weeks before the exam. When I saw this situation, I knew exactly what to do and scored a lot of marks in this attack, allowing me to comfortably pass paper C.
Second tip: The EQE is a very hard and at times very weird exam. However, the EQE is equally weird and equally hard for everyone. Everybody suffers. Nobody is given a single mark for free. Everyone else also has to deal with all the unclear statements and all the ambiguities in a paper. And as a consequence, the EQE is also a very fair exam. At the end of the day, I particulary found one thing to be true (at least from my perspective): Those who study harder, get better results. At least in my group, those who studied the hardest, got the best results, and those who invested less time, got worse results, or may even have failed. So put in the hard work, results will follow!
One thing I wish people told me is the "pressure factor" of doing the actual EQE exam versus doing the practice exams, even under timed exam conditions (this "pressure factor" is also on a different level when compared to the pre-EQE). Near the end of my preparation for the EQE, I was finishing the practice exams under timed conditions relatively easy and felt confident in terms of handling the pressure heading into the EQE. However, when I wrote the first exam (Part D), I fell into a sort of mini-panic if I did not see or know the solution right away. This actually led to my heart rate and breathing significantly increasing, which led to me unnecessarily rushing even more and as a result making silly mistakes I never made during the practice exams (for e.g., misreading details or missing details of the correct answer that I found). Therefore, heading into the remaining parts of the EQE, I told myself that if I get into a mini-panic again because I am struggling to find the solution or know the solution, that I should stop what I am doing for 30 seconds, take some deep breaths and re-centre myself. This ended up helping me tremendously for the remaining parts of the EQE, and the "loss" of 30 seconds here and there during an exam was far better than losing or not getting marks because of falling into a spiral of panic/rushing and making silly mistakes.
Some pieces of advice:
Based on what I wrote above, it is more important to get marks for the answers you do write than rushing to finish the exam and losing marks because of missing details and making silly mistakes. Yes, you need to go fast because of the time pressure, but you do not need to finish the exam to pass or to even get a "good" mark. Therefore, take some extra seconds/minutes to read something twice, double-check this is the path/solution you want to take, or even do nothing for a minute to re-centre yourself and clear your mind instead of rushing through in a mad scramble and losing out on marks you would normally get.Another piece of advice that helped me that Zsofia taught during the study groups is that the EQE exams are designed as a puzzle, and the pieces should fit "seamlessly" if the solution is correct. I think a lot of people don't really internalize this and/or try to apply "real world thinking" to the solution, which can result in spending too much time overthinking the solution or coming to the wrong solution. I think this puzzle approach is especially important in Parts B and C, and to an extent in Parts A and DII. Therefore, do not over think and over analyze the solution thinking of "what ifs" and if this would work in the "real world". Also, if it feels like you are "forcing the pieces together" then you are either missing a key piece of information or it is not the correct solution.
When you are doing exams, make a separate „mistake summary list” when you will be adding all mistakes made in particular exams (like: forgot to comment more on novelty; not discussed dependencies etc.). Before doing next exam, you read the list. More exams done - list is longer, but the chances that you made the same mistake again are smaller 😉
Think about your personal situation. When will you study? Are you a morning or evening person? Or do you only concentrate on weekends? Who will look after your children? How much money will you need for books and courses, and how will you organise this? Will you get some days off work? Life happens alongside exams - you should take that into account. It is also the ultimate reason why comparing strategies makes little sense 🤷♀️
My first advice would be to not simply listen to senior patent attorneys, like partners of your patent law firm, who passed the EQE many years ago, for example even before the Pre-EQE existed, and maybe have some romantic memories. Read the legal texts and informations about how the EQE is conducted very early on in your training, and talk to people who only very recently did the EQE, in particular gather information about what kind of equipment you will need for the electronic EQE.
Secondly, if you are not a native speaker of EN, FR or DE: make a conscious effort to permanently improve your legal and technical vocabulary in one of these three languages. Try to get as much hands-on experience as possible in your daily work in the patent law firm or enterprise without using machine translations between your native language and the other language.
My advice is especially take good care of yourself. It is not just a massive amount of content, but also a mental thing. If you overthink too much, it makes things so much harder. So find ways to keep yourself in balance and don't let external things, like social media posts advising to wear diapers during the exam, distract you.
Estimate how long each part of your studying will take when you are making a study timetable, so that your study plan is realistic and achievable. Otherwise, if you give yourself an impossible amount to do on a particular day/week/weekend, then when you inevitably don't finish it all and fall behind on your study plan, you'll feel bad and overwhelmed. But if you spend a little time thinking about how many hours you actually need to do each practice question, rather than just ambitiously saying you'll do a whole chapter of questions from your D practice question book in a week (they take much longer than you think!), then you can calculate a realistic and achievable study plan, which will help you stay motivated as you won't fall behind as easily. Decide upfront how many past papers you want to do before the exams and realistically allow a day for each and work backwards from the exam dates to build your study plan to include the past papers and other prep like practice questions and reading.
Take advantage of the exams being open book, and as part of your preparation, make resources to help you stay calm and be efficient on the day. Make yourself a summary sheet or template for each exam to have with you on your desk to remind you of common errors you make, important things to remember etc. This can help save you time and stress on the day - prepare something pre-exam to help you on the day under the exam pressure!
Sitting the EQEs is a physical challenge as much as an intellectual one. The exams are long and tiring, and practising past papers with breaks, or even one question a day spread over a week, is not the same as doing the paper in one long sitting and concentrating for such a long time. Practice doing the paper under as similar conditions as you can emulate to how it'll be on the day - e.g. start the past paper at the same time of day as the actual exam will be, so that you can test how sleep, hunger etc. will affect you, and practice doing the paper without a proper meal break and eating as you go along, to see what the conditions will be like when you do the real thing.
My advice is: find your preferred reference books and follow them from the beginning to the end of your preparation. Personalise them with post-its, additional comments (from solutions and/or questions from previous exams), highlights, etc. The more familiar you are with the reference material, the faster you will be able to find the answers. Another thing that helped me a lot was to do the coffee-break questions and the legal questions from the Delta patent D book. Then I printed out the answers that I found most difficult and organised them by topic (e.g. entry into the EP regional phase, etc.) This helped me a lot to revise the arguments and organise the different thematics in my mind.
For paper C, I had a template with all the situations that were common in the previous exams (summarised from previous papers) so that I could find a structure to write the ‘notice of opposition’ more quickly and efficiently. I made the same templates for papers D2 and B.
Last but not least, take care of yourself (physically and mentally) :) It is a marathon and endurance is the key.
For non-native candidates: improve your English (or German, or French). Read faster, understand better. If you don’t read fiction, read Visser. If you don’t read Visser, read fiction. Watch US/UK tv shows. A lot. Most of my preparations was reading and watching Gossip Girl and House MD. But most importantly, improve your English. Be proficient. Read granted EP (or translate them for validation into national language). There is a reason why for Poles from PL passrate is 10%, and the same Poles living in the UK pass in 90% of cases. Yes, it is English.
Don’t be perfect, be quick. As quick as possible. Getting 30-40% of points in half the exam time will easily let you pass, by finding the remaining points in the other half of the time.
This might look a bit sarcastic but I truly believe that keeping in mind that failing or passing the EQE is not that important really helps.
One thing that I found useful is to read the decisions of the Boards of Appeal of the previous 2-3 years that were published in the OJ in full. Nowadays that would be the decisions that are published as ‘selected decisions’ on the EPO website. Often you find that the actual circumstances of the real cases have been covered in parts of the exams. If you are able to recognise these circumstances you know where to find the answers.
It may sound odd, but my best advice came from a certain well-known Disney film:
In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job's a game
Whilst still challenging, I found much more motivation to practice and prepare for Papers A, B, and C once I began to focus on the puzzle/game-like nature of each exam that I enjoyed. All the pieces of the answer are already there, you just need to assemble them!
Sadly this tactic is less applicable to Paper D, and may be of less relevance to the new format, but I think it is still worth trying nonetheless!
Ein Blick in die Gesetzesbücher erleichtert die Rechtsfindung. To know the law (skip Art.1-50 apart from Art.14) and maybe G-decisions should be almost enough. Train with some 3-4 of the most recent exams under exam conditions.
Well, my advice would be to check out the published exams from recent years, in particular the published „Examiners’ reports“. They contain some general guidance as to what errors often occur. And if you compare the reports from several years you may find that there are certain errors and misconceptions that show up frequently (such as incorrect assignment of priority dates). If you then try to understand the law and the rules dealing with these topics, you have a good chance to avoid the most prominent pitfalls.
Some advise to start would be: to have a printed version of the EPC articles and rules and doing your own annotated version. When an article/rule refers to a another article/rule, or to the Official Journal, write beside it a summary of what it talks about. Some information in the articles can be completed by the information present in the rules, make the link between them and refer to both articles and rules (when relevant) when answering questions. Print and read the summaries of all the G decisions and class them by topics, making also a link between those G decisions with articles and rules. Be aware that some early G decisions may be obsolete as jurisprudence evolves (check case law and guidelines for that). Do the same exercise with the PCT articles and regulations. Once you'll have done your own annotated versions of EPC and PCT, you'll have a good overview and understanding of them and can start the daily D questions available from the EPO and/or the Delta Patent D book. Methodology courses for the old EQE was helpful for time management, it will be certainly good to follow for the new EQE too.
Looking up a strategy to score as many points as possible in as little time as possible very early in your preparation is key, I think. Compare strategies from different people/organisations/colleagues and adapt them to the way you prefer to work. Find your own strategy, that allows you to find quickly the points where you can score. It is not so important how much you know, but how fast you can write a text with the things that will give you points. And then practice, practice, practice until you become even faster.
Use good reference books and constantly add markings when you practice for the information you needed. A lot of topics will be repeated after every few years, so you might have seen most of it, if you practice with a lot of old exams. And if there is something you don't immediately know the answer for (there always will be), if you are fast enough to finish the parts you can write down quickly, you have enough time to look up those problems and can incorporate as many as you have time for later on.
Would you like to add any tips for first-time sitters?
Please feel free to send me a message or simply write in the comment section.