It felt very long, and it turns out it was 7 pages longer than 2017.
Most of the people I talked to had issues getting through everything, and the inventive step seemed very complicated to sort out. Almost every document had comments related to other documents, and some negative statements which were possibly meant to be teachings away.
There were some relatively straightforward novelty attacks (which you could do when you found them), but for the inventive step attacks you would usually read through everything first to see what the strongest was. By that time, there was not much time left to write out the attacks, and it was not so easy to pick the closest prior art. The comments I heard from others was that it was "overwhelming" and "endless reading".
In a few weeks you will get a copy of your answers. If you cut up the exam paper (with your childsafe scissors ,-), and glued or taped it into your answer, check carefully to see if any piece is missing. Or whether there are pages missing. It can happen that pages get stuck together, and then are missed during scanning. Or pieces fall off. If you notice anything, notify the EQE secretariat.
