Terry Carroll
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Re: What Patent Prep Material Should I buy?
« Reply #5 on: May 21st, 2007, 12:47pm » |
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on May 16th, 2007, 11:42am, Saira wrote:| I have another question. Is it better to get the at home study materials or a classroom course from PLI? Also what do you think of PRG's (Patent resource group's) patent review course? |
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I did the PRG self-study, and liked it a lot.
I think it must be better than the classroom offering. I can't imagine having all of this information shoveled into my brain at once. By watching videos, I was able to spread it out over 2-3 months, which for me works much better.
My procedure was chapter-by-chapter, this way: 1) read the chapter; 2) watch the video for the chapter; 3) answer the questions for the chapter; 4) self-grade the questions.
There's about 1-2 hours of video for each chapter; just a little over 40 in all. I found most of my time was spend answering the questions (which is invaluable).
As time went on, I had to modify my "answer the questions" step, because I feared I would run out of time before the course completed. Sometimes the sheer volume of available questions, given the time I had to prepare, made that impractical. For example, Chapter 11 includes 138 questions over 62 pages; at 2-3 minutes per question, that's 5 or 6 hours. So I would cut the questions into 2 or 3 segments, answer one segment and come back to answer another after I completed the course.
If you have a deadline (I registered for the exam before starting the course, something I don't recommend, so I had a real deadline), you'll really need to budget your study time. I did this by adding up all the hours of video and tracking my progress on a spreadsheet, so I would know, for example, "Given how much I've done and what's left, to be done by April 30, I have to do 1:38 hours per day."
My exam was May 11, and I really kicked into my study at the beginning of March. It wasn't until I set up that spreadsheet that I was really able to control my pacing.
Also, you'll want to do the online exams fairly often. I did it in two ways, either a simulated 50-question session; or a session where I didn't really try pacing myself, but drew questions *only* from those chapters where I had the lowest scores on the paper reviews.
Back to PRG in particular, it is incredibly boring: they often find a way to take a 1-minute concept and expand it into a 10 or 15 minute discussion. In the very beginning, they spend a bizarre amount of time just explaining that the materials have sequential page numbers. And how you can use them. In case you get them out of order. You can put them back in order. Because the page numbers are in sequence. That kind of thing.
Much more rarely, they sometimes spend less time on a subject than I think it needs; but that might just be me. I think there's some effort on their part to keep the subjects to 1-hour lectures, and the subject matter doesn't always fit that.
But, all in all, it's a very thorough course, and a good preparation. I don't regret my choice. Of course, PRG was the only course I actually took, so I can't compare to the others.
Anyway, I did pass, and I give the PRG course a lot of the credit for that
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