Authorized Schooling
NextGen UBE ‘blueprint’ welcome, however extra data on new bar exams wanted, sources say
June 30, 2025, 9:28 am CDT
“The main points discovered within the blueprint are grounded in knowledge we’ve gathered over hundreds of hours of improvement and pretesting,” stated Kara McWilliams, the NCBE’s chief product officer, in a press launch. “They’re designed to offer clear steerage for educators and candidates getting ready for the NextGen examination.” (Picture from Shutterstock)
The Nationwide Convention of Bar Examiners’ “blueprint” for the NextGen UBE presents welcome data about how the brand new check shall be completely different than the present Uniform Bar Examination, authorized lecturers say. However additionally they say that vital items of data, similar to a broader number of pattern questions and particular examine supplies, are nonetheless lacking—and might’t come quickly sufficient for regulation colleges and bar candidates.
“[The] 2026 bar-takers deserved to have this info in 2023,” Marsha Griggs, an affiliate professor on the Saint Louis College College of Legislation and rapid previous president of the Affiliation of Tutorial Assist Educators, wrote to the ABA Journal.
The NCBE started planning in 2018 for the brand new examination, which emphasizes expertise new attorneys want over memorization, and its first administration is scheduled for July 2026. At press time, 41 jurisdictions have dedicated to the check that can cowl eight areas of doctrine and consider seven foundational lawyering expertise. The Uniform Bar Examination and its parts—the Multistate Essay Examination, the Multistate Efficiency Take a look at and the Multistate Bar Examination—will sundown in 2028.
“The main points discovered within the blueprint are grounded in knowledge we’ve gathered over hundreds of hours of improvement and pretesting,” stated Kara McWilliams, the NCBE’s chief product officer, in a press launch. “They’re designed to offer clear steerage for educators and candidates getting ready for the NextGen examination.”
“Far more samples are wanted,” says Marsha Griggs, an affiliate professor on the Saint Louis College College of Legislation and rapid previous president of the Affiliation of Tutorial Assist Educators. “We don’t have sufficient info to do greater than speculate about what candidates might want to put together for this examination.” (Photograph by Jeannie Liataud Images/ABA Journal)
Not California
The NextGen UBE launch follows the State Bar of California’s disastrous February administration of its new hybrid and distant examination. Authored by Kaplan Examination Companies and deployed by Meazure Studying, the examination was plagued with logistical and technical points as monetary pressures pressured the cash-strapped state to hurry the launch of the check, which didn’t embrace NCBE questions.
Sources contacted by the ABA Journal applaud the NCBE’s regular and considerate efforts to launch a brand new examination.
“We is not going to see a repeat in any method, form or kind, of what occurred in California with the NCBE on the helm,” says Susannah Pollvogt, principal advisor for lecturers and curriculum for the Legislation College Admission Council’s Authorized Schooling Consulting group.
Whereas admirable, sources say, that deliberateness has a draw back, slowing the discharge of data, which hamstrings regulation faculty educators’ and bar candidates’ skills to totally prep for the brand new examination.
One key useful resource that’s nonetheless lacking is the “sourcebooks of regulation” aiming to get rid of the guesswork on which authorized ideas shall be examined. These will begin rolling out in August, says Judith Gundersen, the NCBE president and chief operation officer.
The books are constructed to help “the broader authorized group and regulation college particularly as we transition to the NextGen UBE,” she provides, with actual property and contracts being the primary books launched and the ultimate e book, household regulation, coming in early 2026.
However that’s info that may very well be used proper now, says Deborah Jones Merritt, a professor emerita on the Ohio State College Moritz Faculty of Legislation and a 2025 ABA Journal Authorized Insurgent. “I’m puzzled that NCBE hasn’t launched these already,” she provides. “They’d be very useful for each candidates and college supporting them. They usually would possibly cut back among the stress to buy industrial bar prep programs.”
Extra questions, please
A brand new pattern authorized analysis efficiency activity, which has 4 multiple-choice questions, one short-answer query and one medium-answer writing project, is included within the blueprint, launched June 3. Different samples can be found on the NCBE web site. One efficiency activity will seem in every three-hour examination part, in accordance with the NCBE.
“Far more samples are wanted,” Griggs wrote. “We don’t have sufficient info to do greater than speculate about what candidates might want to put together for this examination.”
Joan Howarth, a professor emerita on the College of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd College of Legislation who wrote the 2022 e book Shaping the Bar: The Way forward for Legal professional Licensing, agrees.
“The extra examples NCBE supplies, the higher for everybody,” she says. “The earlier NCBE supplies their examine guides of fabric to be coated, scheduled for 2025-26, the higher.”
These samples are on their method, Gundersen says. Six extra hours of examination questions shall be launched in August, bringing the overall as much as 12 hours of apply content material, she provides.
Nonetheless, traditionally, candidates have had a whole lot of multiple-choices questions plus dozens of essays and efficiency checks to prep for the UBE, Pollvogt says. “However graduates taking the examination in July of 2026 will not be going to have that wealth of supplies.”
Together with the pattern questions, the NCBE plans to launch extra supplies in August—an official examinees information and a closing content material scope define, Gundersen says.
Regulate curricula
Most of the merchandise units and efficiency duties cross doctrinal topics, a transfer that’s genuine to apply, Merritt says. Whereas she applauds that change, “colleges ought to give college students extra expertise making use of information and expertise from a number of programs to a single consumer downside.”
However subjects in courses are sometimes siloed, Pollvogt says. “Abilities are taught right here, writing is taught right here, analysis is taught right here,” she says. “Your typical doctrinal college member may not generally incorporate analysis duties into their classroom.” She provides that college students needs to be uncovered to the forms of questions on the bar throughout the three years of regulation faculty.
Merritt notes that 2026 grads sitting for the examination can have completed programs associated to the examination a yr or extra earlier than the check.
“It’s too late now to reteach these programs differently,” says the co-author of the landmark 2020 Constructing a Higher Bar examine.
“I’m puzzled that NCBE hasn’t launched these already,” says Deborah Jones Merritt, a professor emerita on the Ohio State College Moritz Faculty of Legislation and a 2025 ABA Journal Authorized Insurgent. “They’d be very useful for each candidates and college supporting them. They usually would possibly cut back among the stress to buy industrial bar prep programs.” (Photograph by Maddie McGarvey)
Want for velocity
Whereas the blueprint revealed that the NCBE set the rating scale between 500 and 750 factors, every jurisdiction in the end determines its personal go rating, “a really difficult facet of licensing the place the authorized career has been weak,” says Howarth, a 2025 Journal Authorized Insurgent.
She finds the NCBE’s plans for scoring “wise,” however they’ll require “jurisdictions to grapple with customary setting in methods few have accomplished earlier than.”
“NCBE shall be working with jurisdictions to offer insights from the October 2024 prototype examination and Might 2025 standard-setting examine to assist inform these selections,” Gundersen says.
However how the rating shall be tallied raises some eyebrows. A number of-choice questions make up 40% of the brand new examination when it comes to timing however account for 49% of the rating, one thing Pollvogt finds “unlucky.”
“I’m not fairly certain why that may be weighted extra closely, particularly in mild of the truth that the NextGen bar examination is meant to maneuver away from memorization,” she says.
And the general timing of the check is altering. The brand new examination shifts the check from 12 hours over two full days to 9 hours over one and a half days, with two three-hour periods on the primary day and one three-hour session on the second day.
“It locations way more emphasis on the flexibility to learn and digest main sources in actual time, and 51% of the rating on the examination will rely upon these explicit expertise,” Pollvogt says.
Merritt is worried in regards to the want for velocity.
“Even minutes will matter on this examination,” she says. “Pace isn’t a part of minimal competence for lawyering. We wish to license attorneys who’re considerate and take the time to analysis consumer points.”
Expensive affair?
College students and states are ready for extra info on how a lot the examination will value to take and administer, sources say.
“For the candidates, that’s an ideal concern,” LSAC’s Pollvogt says. “It’s already very, very troublesome to financially survive whereas finding out for and taking the bar examination and ready for outcomes.”
The prices are additionally important info for jurisdictions.
“State supreme courts and public servants have to be upfront about what they’re spending on this examination,” Griggs says, “and I battle deeply to know how state supreme courts can announce (and even take into account) the adoption of any new bar examination with out first having full particulars on the prices to the state and to the examinees.”
Identical to the present examination, examinees can pay for using the software program and jurisdictions pay for the examination itself, wrapping that value into utility charges, usually together with charges for character and health investigations, amenities and staffing, Gundersen says.
“Jurisdictions might elect to extend their utility charges to replicate the modest enhance in the price of the examination, however NCBE has not but heard of any jurisdiction that has accomplished so,” she provides.
The NextGen UBE shall be utterly performed on computer systems. After California’s bar examination’s tech points in February, lecturers are cautiously conserving their fingers crossed that the NextGen UBE tech shall be extra dependable than the NCBE’s makes an attempt throughout the pandemic to computerize bar exams.
Later this summer season, extra tutorials strolling by the software program shall be out there publicly, Gundersen says.
“NCBE workforce goes to nice lengths to see the platform function with out hiccup. It may appear like 2020 yet again,” Griggs says. “It’s wishful considering to imagine that NCBE’s first launch of a completely computerized examination, utilizing a brand new software program supplier, goes to be with out glitch.
“We hope for the perfect,” she provides.
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