Unofficial Results Now Available at End of Computer Examination

Registration candidates taking the morning and afternoon sessions of the computer-delivered examination in a single day will receive an unofficial result at the end of the examination on the computer on which they take the examination.

As of Monday, August 1, 2005, candidates taking the examination in a single day will receive unofficial test results at the end of the exam. A program providing the results has been deployed to all test sites.

Candidates achieving an unofficial score of 70% or more will be informed that they passed. The information they receive at that point in time is unofficial. No score will be provided to passing candidates. Candidates with scores below 70% will be notified of the percent of their correct answers. The Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) will mail official results to each candidate about a week after the candidate takes the examination.

Candidates taking the computer delivered examination over a period of two days will not receive unofficial results at the end of either day. Official results will be mailed by OED. The computer is unable to inform the candidate of the results because the candidate takes only half of the exam each day and the computer has only the results for that day for that person.

As previously announced, as of June 9, 2005 the registration examination is using the Eighth Edition, Revision 2 of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP). The computer-delivered examinations include 100 multiple-choice questions, and only ninety of the questions will be scored. Accordingly, to pass the examination a candidate must correctly answer seventy percent (sixty-three) of the ninety scored questions. Each of the scored questions has been used on previous examinations forms and had been psychometrically analyzed to ensure the question provides a useful assessment of a candidate's legal qualifications.

Ten of the questions on the computer-delivered examination and the paper-based examination will be undergoing beta testing. The ten beta test questions will be distributed throughout the examination. The ten beta test questions will not be identified and will not be scored. These questions will be psychometrically analyzed to assess if the questions are too simple, too complex, or too ambiguous to serve as an adequate basis for measuring candidates' legal qualifications. Accordingly, these questions will not be included in the scoring of a candidate's examination or in determining whether a candidate has passed or failed an examination. Beta test questions will not be available for review, for example, by candidates who do not pass the examination.

Beta test questions that are found to accurately measure candidates' legal qualifications will be introduced into future examination forms and scored. The future examination forms will include different beta test questions. In this manner, the Office will continue to beta test new questions in the registration examination to identify questions capable of measuring candidates' legal qualifications and add those questions to the data bank of questions that can be used and scored in the registration examination.