15-07-2022: added comments about translation errors.
14-07-22 – added note about split exams compensation.
13-07-22 – added “fit to practice” check during marking.
A big congratulations to all who passed at least at one exam. None of the exams are easy, and if you are unlucky, it is easy to miss something crucial or to misread a sentence.
The result totals and statistics are available here. The pass rate for B is higher than last year, and D is relatively high compared to previous years (not including D 2021 because of the global compensation for technical issues).
Unfortunately, (since 2021) anonymized individual results are no longer made available, so we cannot calculate statistics or see the mark distributions per exam. Joeri Beetz has a nice website with extensive statistics for the older exams. We were told last year that this omission was due to a lack of capacity.
2021 “Pass rates” – candidates with 45 points or higher:
- Nr of candidates: Main Exam = 2780, A = 1905, B = 2005, C = 1852, D = 2003
- A = 79%, B = 65%, C = 57%, D = 92%
- Passed last exam in 2021: 1093 (= 53 % of all ME candidates)
2022 “Pass rates” – candidates with 45 points or higher:
- Nr of candidates: Main Exam = 1918, A = 886, B = 1158, C = 1400, D = 704
- A = 73%, B = 84%, C = 61%, D = 71%
- Passed last exam in 2022: 885 (= 46 % of all ME candidates)
The Examiners Reports for each exam are also available here. Unfortunately, the marking sheets are missing (they were included in 2021 and previous years). These are the same as each candidate receives, with a rough division of available marks. I don’t know why they are not included this year.
For each exam, the Examination Committees have selected Candidates’ Answers in English, French and German who scored quite highly with an exam answer close to their desired solution. These are unedited, so they can contain mistakes. Unfortunately, the marking sheets for these candidates are still missing (they were also missing in 2021). These marking sheets were very useful for candidates trying to understand where they missed marks. We were told last year that this omission was due to a lack of capacity.
Still to be published is the Survey report, summarising the answers provided immediately after the exam. It will appear here, at the bottom of the page. Hopefully, it will be back to it’s pre-2020 extensive format. In 2021, it was merely a PR folder – we were told last year that this was due to a lack of capacity.
In October (usually in week 42), there will be a meeting of Tutor’s and the Examination Committees to directly discuss the exams of 2022, and to look ahead to EQE 2023. No definite date for the meeting is yet available. In 2021, it was online – no word yet if it will be back to an in-person gathering.
If you passed your last exam, double congratulations 🥇and welcome to the post-EQE world 💪.
- For attorneys, request entry onto the list of representatives.
- If you are a national of a non-EPC state and you wish to be on the list, you need to request an exemption under Art. 134(7). This involves extra administration – see the FAQ’s. Preston Richard has made a template letter that you can use.
- Relax and look forward to developing other aspects of your career.
- Even though the epi has no formal requirement for permanent education, commit to keeping up your knowledge. You still need up-to-date knowledge to provide optimal services to your clients, especially of changes in EPO procedure:
- Subscribe to a blog that regularly discusses case law and legal changes, like the IP.appify blog
- Go through the yearly changes to the EPO guidelines and follow G decisions
- Use your legal knowledge more in your daily work (see if a colleague needs help with an office action or opposition, give a presentation to your office, check whether your office procedures meet “all due care”, teach subjects to trainees, write a legal article).
- Attend or follow the EPO’s education sessions related to Applying for a Patent, to Law and Practice, or for Patent Attorneys.
- Become a tutor, or volunteer for an Examination Committee
- If you have added digital notes to EPC.app and PCT.app, they will be updated automatically each year.
Click on READ MORE > > for possible actions after a fail
If you failed an exam, think carefully about your options 🤔.
If you failed an exam, think carefully about your options 🤔.
- Realise you are not alone – most candidates take at least 2 years to pass everything.
- I passed A, C and D first time (passing D mainly on D2). My very complicated B solution got few marks. The next year, my simple B solution easily passed 😃. I always struggled with “B” – I only passed the equivalent NL attorney national paper at the 3rd attempt 😮.
- Don’t be embarrassed by failure. Even well-prepared and “brilliant” candidates can fail.
- You have to decide for yourself what to do. There are no magic formulas that work for everybody, especially when you are balancing family, relationships and work with your study. Look for the path that will make you the happiest. Take some time to think it through. Examples of decisions that candidates have made:
- if you are unhappy at your current work, but only partially qualified, you can still get another job. In particular, if you have already passed D, a lot of firms will take a chance on you.
- concentrating on national patent attorney qualifications first instead of EQE, or concentrating on EQE first before national qualifications
- leaving an attorney firm to join the EPO, or leaving the EPO to join an attorney firm
- leaving an attorney firm to join a company, or leaving a company to join an attorney firm
- taking a year off from studying, or immediately registering for all failed exams
- concentrating on well-being alongside studying for the exam. E.g. running more, eating healthier and, especially, MEDITATING
- Be aware of what your options are, particularly with compensable fails. The EQE helpdesk will be happy to answer any questions about this.
- 44 or less is a fail, 45 to 49 is a compensable fail. You can retake any paper that you have failed (49 or less).
- Each time that you do a paper, they will check to see the status of all 4 paper scores, and whether you satisfy the EQE passing criteria at that moment.
- To pass, you need at least 200 marks in total for all exams, with no more than two compensable fails. For example: A: 60, B: 50, C: 45, D: 45 and A: 55, B: 55, C: 45, D: 45 are just enough to pass.
- Study your exam in detail to see where you went wrong. Compare it to the model solution in the Examiners Report. Why did you not get the other 55 marks that were available? Be honest with yourself about whether your preparation was good enough. Did you focus during the exam on completing the parts with the most marks, or were you doing the parts that you like instead? Were you trying to provide “perfect answers?”
- Also look at the Candidate’s Answer in your preferred language – what did they get that you missed? But be aware that this is usually a native speaker who write a lot (padding and generic statements don’t score any marks), managed to get on the wavelength of the Examination Committee, and scored around 80 marks. You do not need this level to pass.
Option 1: “bank” your compensable fails
- For a compensable fail, you can keep it in your results “bank” and try to compensate it with a pass of at least 55 in another paper. If you retake a failed paper, the score in your “bank” is always overwritten by the new one, even if it is lower.
- If you have 45 – 49 for D in your “bank”, think carefully before retaking it. It is a lot of work to prepare for D, and you can score above 60 marks in A and B if you are very well prepared. It used to be the same for C, but the current online format and imperfect split makes scoring on C unpredictable.
Option 2: prepare your study plan to resit
- If you were well-prepared and you failed, then it is quite a shock. Especially when you see other fellow candidates all pass. Don’t be embarrassed by failure. Even well-prepared and “brilliant” candidates can fail.
- If you were not well-prepared for the first time, then you already know what you need to differently – prepare well.
- The biggest problem resitters face is confidence. During each paper, you need to take a thousand micro-decisions about where to start, what to write down, what to do now, what to do later, when to stop writing, parts to skip etc. The first time your confidence is sky-high, so you are not afraid to take these decisions. But when you resit, you will be more hesitant to take decisions in case you are “wrong”. This can be hard to break, especially if you are not used to a fear of failing.
- Be careful when resitting D. You need to be able to motivate yourself to go through everything again. A lot of D resitters end up in a vicious cycle of postponing studying until quite late, not being well-prepared and failing again.
- In general, D resitters get better on the D2 part, and get worse on the D1 part. This is due to daily work experience advising clients helping you to get through D2 faster, whereas D1 involves being able to find minute details from the law in article/rules that you never encounter in practice. So, if you expect D1 to get worse, make sure you get practice D2 more.
- You might run out of old papers to practice because you have done them all. But you can learn a lot by redoing them and trying to score more marks in different areas of the paper. You can also go back and do older ones, but the exam formats and the law has changed over the years.
- If you are doing the exam in a non-native language, you can practice reading, listening and writing in En, Fr or Ger using the Terminology Manual. This is great resource for training patent attorneys, and the examples used are old EQE exams.
Option 3: file an appeal
- In general, I advise candidates not to do this unless they think that following the long and frustrating process will help them mentally. You may not get a decision until after registration for the next EQE has closed, so you will need to pre-emptively register. In most Main Exam cases, you will only get a final decision after the next EQE has been held. So, you should not do it if it will affect your preparation for the next EQE.
- The details of the appeal procedure are not publicly documented, so this is what I know from thee handful of appeals that I have seen over the years. If you are in doubt about any of these points, check with the EQE helpdesk.
- The exam preparation and marking is pretty thorough, so the chances of winning an appeal by means of the Disciplinary Board of Appeal are quite small. But the procedure does guarantee that your appeal letter is read and considered by the Examination Board.
- There is one fee that you need to pay to challenge the decision, and that covers challenges of the marks awarded to 1 – 4 of your papers. It is set at 6x the examination fee – R. 9, IPREE. You will get your fee back if the appeal is allowable, or if the Examination Board revises their decision. You can also request a whole or partial refund if you agree to withdraw at critical points in the appeal procedure.
- You should think about what you want to get out of it, and how far you are willing to go in this slow procedure. There are two main steps in the procedure:
- 1) an initial review by the Examination Board. They have 2 months to decide whether to revise their decision (either wholly regarding the passing/failing of the EQE or partially regarding the number of marks awarded for one or more papers). If they do not revise their decision, they send it to the Disciplinary Board of Appeal.
- 2) a full consideration of the appeal by the Disciplinary Board of Appeal. In most Main Exam cases, you will not get a decision until after the next EQE. It is intended as a written procedure, but you can request oral proceedings.
- Preston Richard has compiled an overview of the appeal procedure here. Be aware that the EPC does not automatically apply, so you need to make sure that everything is done in time. The rules for the EQE appeal are often inflexible, so if in doubt, check with the EQE helpdesk. For example:
- Only 1 month to file the appeal AND all the grounds, and to also pay the fee.
- The 10-day rule (Rule 126(2) EPC) can be applied for the time limits
- The fee cannot be paid using the EPO online software. It must be paid by bank transfer. It is also possible to pay the fee via the MyEQE portal, but you need to ask the EQE helpdesk to enable the option.
- The appeal cannot be filed using the EPO online software and also not via the MyEQE portal. It either needs to be sent by post early enough that it arrives in time, or you can fax it to the EQE helpdesk. Be aware that the deadline for the appeal runs out for everyone on the same day, so you can have connection problems if you are trying to fax at the last moment. After faxing, you need to send an original immediately to the EQE secretariat.
- Your exam has been marked by two markers independently and anonymously.
- In cases where the markers total score deviated too much from each other, it has either been re-evaluated by the same markers or marked by a third marker. This is not indicated in your decision, but I think these are marking sheets where the marks for each question are exactly the same for both markers.
- For scores of 43-44 and 48-49, the Examination Board checks “fit-to-practice”, to see whether you were unfairly marked down:
- they look for parts of your answer that did not directly score marks, but which indicate a level deserving of higher marks. These marks are indicated in the decision as 1-2 additional marks – i.e. not part of the exam marking sheets. About 20-40 candidates benefit each year per exam.
- But mistakes do happen, and the markers may misunderstand what you have written. Study your exam answer in detail. Compare it to the model solution in the Examiners Report. Also look at the Candidate’s Answer in your preferred language. Try to identify:
- parts of your answer that do not appear to have been marked, or are identical to the Examiners Report but received far fewer marks than indicated
- parts of your answer that are in the “wrong” place. For example, additional comments on claim 4 added after claim 6 arguments.
- incorrect labelling of answers or parts of answers
- use of unusual words, or words in your own native language that may be unclear or ambiguous.
- If a mistake like this has actually been made, the Examination Board will usually revise the decision within 2 months. A revised decision is again open to a new appeal.
- If the case is more complicated, it will need to go to the Board of Appeal. It will then take several months before you receive their preliminary opinion, to which you can respond. The powers of the Disciplinary Board are limited – in most cases, they cannot do more than order the Examination Board to remark an answer, taking into account certain considerations. But such a remarking does not automatically lead to more marks. If you are about 3 to 5 marks short of your goal (pass or compensable fail), then you are in the range of typical marks increase where the Disciplinary Board agrees with you.
- Preston Richard has compiled an overview of recent appeal decisions here. There are several types of issue that you can address in your appeal:
- 1) the Examination Board or Committees did not follow their own procedures. This is difficult to argue because you can only find fragments of the procedures in the case law.
- 2) Unequal treatment of one or more candidates. For example, due to an error or a translation error in the En, Fr or Ge version of the exam. It does not matter which languages that you actually used because there is no way to determine who actually was affected by the translation error. So they award the compensation marks to all applicants who appealed that paper.
- 3) Double penalisation. You should only be punished once for the same mistake. Unfortunately, parts of the exam will depend on another part (e.g. a claim may be dependent on another), so this principle can be difficult to apply in a way that avoids double penalisation in all cases. This is currently one of the stronger appeal arguments, particularly for B and C.
- 4) Time loss due to technical issue. This is still developing based on appeals filed in 2021. In D 0037/21, reason 23, the Disciplinary Board suggested three ways to compensate an individual for a technical problem: a least generous approach, a more generous approach, and the average of the least and more generous. I have seen a couple of cases where the Examination Board has applied the least generous approach – the candidate’s pc crashed in WISEflow, and it took some time to get the invigilator password and to get everything working again. That is based on an extrapolation of the actual number of marks scored:
- compensation = (marks scored / (total exam time – time lost)) * time lost
- For example, 20 minutes lost in B for a candidate with 42 marks may be compensated with (42 / (210 – 20)) * 20 => approx. 4 marks => 46 marks
- Note that the examples in D 0037/21 are for a single-session exam. I do not know how these formulae will be applied to the split exams – D1-1, D1-2, D2 and C-1, C-2. They are still officially one exam with one score, but marks are awarded separately for each part. So it is possible to have a part-only calculation and complete paper calculation.
- I have copied the comments below from an earlier post, where a discussion started about appeal.
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