Tuesday, March 01, 2022 New instructions to candidates for EQE 2022, new myEQE notice, comments on Wiseflow (annotation)

 In the Official Journal published yesterday, two new notices in respect to the EQE were published:

• Instructions to candidates concerning the conduct of the European qualifying examination - OJ 2022, A20 (superseding OJ 2021, A13 per 4/2/2022; which superseded the Instructions in OJ Suppl 2./2019)
   
• Notice from the Examination Secretariat for the European qualifying examination (on MyEQE) - OJ 2022, A21 (superseding OJ 2020, A140)

I also added some observations of unexpected behaviour of the annotation function in Wiseflow at the end of this post.

Note that the Wiseflow Mocks are only available until 6 March 2022 (I assume to prevent any possible confusion between Mocks and real EQE flows)! So if you want to do some further testing in Wiseflow, do not wait until the day before your exam paper!

1. Instructions to candidates

The Instructions to candidates concerning the conduct of the European qualifying examination  provide detailed instructions to the conduct of the EQE, Pre-Exam and Main Exam. It is more extensive than the previous version. The Instructions are organized in the following sections:

I. General (examination system, invigilation, ..., complaints procedure)

II. Examination Environment (location, room, ...)

III. Technical requirements (Wiseflow recommendations, candidates' responsibilities, some hardware requirements, forbidden shortcuts, ...)

IV. Preparation and start of the examination (Wisefliow profile, latest version, log in 60 min before start of each flow, printable parts can be printed before start of the flow - may need refresh to see them, valid ID, launch flow within 15 minutes after start time, any printed material can be used, no electronic equipment allowed than the computer system required for the examination, ...)

V. Exam invigilation (preparation, invigilator powers, face and ears must be clearly visible, unscheduled breaks, contacting the invigilator, finishing the exam, ...)

VI. Misconduct (non-exhaustive list of fraudulent behaviour or misconduct, use of video and audio recordings and chat logs if necessary, consequences, ...)

VII. Withdrawing enrolment 

For the complete instructions, refer to OJ 2022, A20

2. MyEQE

The Notice from the Examination Secretariat for the European qualifying examination in OJ 2022, A21.updates the previous Notice on MyEQE.

The Notice informs candidates that all correspondence from the Examination Secretariat will be conducted in electronic form only, via the myEQE portal. This goes for all appealable decisions too. The requirement to use registered mail is removed. 

Appealable decisions will be deemed delivered ten days after being made available on myEQE. The time limits for appeal under Article 24 REE will apply mutatis mutandis. 

With regard to filing an appeal under Article 24 REE, the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal apply.

See OJ 2022, A21.

3. Wiseflow (main exam) - be careful with annotation in multiple tabs!

The EQE 2022 version of Wiseflow allows to annotate the pdf of the paper when viewed in a separate tabs. Especially for the papers where nothing (paper D) or only part (paper A and B) can be printed, annotation may be a useful tool - most candidates use some form of annotation when doing an exam on paper.

However, a candidate informed me that the annotation tool does not always work as expected (see below) if the paper is opened in multiple tabs (e.g., in paper B: one for the proposed amendments, one for the communication, one for each of the prior arts). For that reason, highlighting and annotating the same exam paper in different tabs is not recommended, or at least needs to be done with care in view of the behaviour of the system. What the candidate and I observed is the following:

Only the highlights/annotations from one of the tab are saved so that they are visible in other tabs when the paper is subsequently opened in another than and so hat they reappear when that first tab would be closed and again opened. Highlights/annotations done on the same exam paper opened in further tabs (e.g., on a page showing a prior art document) get lost when the tab is closed. So, if the description is opened in the main tab, the proposed amendments are annotated in another tab, and the prior art is annotated in again another tab, the annotations get lost on the pages proposed amendments and on the prior art when the tab with the prior art is closed.

When a further tab is Refreshed, the annotations made on that tab disappear and a copy of the annotated paper of the first tab appears.

When the paper is already open in multiple tabs, an annotation made in one tab does not show in the other tabs (apart from the effect of a Refresh, see above).

When the first tab is annotated, opening the paper again in another tab show the paper with the same annotations.

It thus seems that the annotation tool in the pdf viewer was not designed to handle separate instances of the same document in multiple tabs. It rather seems that one tab (which seems to be the first in which the paper opened) is used as the "main" tab of which the annotations are stored in a cache (which is used to restore after closing the main tab, and which is used when a new tab is opened), while the annotations made in other tabs are volatile and are lost when the tab is closed.

If you intend to use annotation in multiple tabs, it is strongly recommend to check the possibilities as well as the limitations of the annotation tool!

Comment: the above are a combination of the observations from the candidate and from me. I do not know whether the behaviour is necessarily the same on all papers and on all systems, and/or whether other unexpected or expected behaviour may occur. E.g., I did not test whether, after having closed the first tab with the pdf, the then concurring main tab (previously the second tab with the paper) will take the role of the first tab such that any (further) annotation made therein will be cached and no longer those of the original first tab...

Note: if you use annotation and then want to copy part of the paper into the editor, you need to switch from "Annotate" to "View" in the top of the window before you can copy.