The Bar Exam Enters a New Era
by Judith A. Gundersen
Eight years ago, we asked a simple question: what does a competent new lawyer actually need to know? This July, the answer arrives in the form of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination. For the first time, select US jurisdictions will administer the NextGen UBE—an exam built through research, transparency, legal industry engagement, and rigorous testing.
Our work began in 2018, when the National Conference of Bar Examiners created an independent Testing Task Force to conduct a comprehensive three-year study of the future of lawyer licensing. The mandate was straightforward but ambitious: identify the foundational knowledge and skills newly licensed lawyers need in a changing legal landscape and determine how and when those competencies should be assessed.
The study unfolded in three phases.
First, the Task Force conducted listening sessions across the country, engaging more than 400 stakeholders, including bar admission leaders, judges, legal educators, and practicing attorneys. These conversations provided broad professional insight and were deliberately unconstrained by the design of the existing exam.
Second, the Task Force commissioned a nationwide practice analysis survey completed by nearly 15,000 lawyers. The data provided a detailed empirical picture of the work performed by newly licensed lawyers and the knowledge and skills they use most frequently. This was one of the most extensive practice analyses ever conducted in the legal profession.
Third, committees composed of bar admission officials, legal educators, and practitioners applied their professional judgment to the qualitative and quantitative findings to recommend what content should be tested and how it should be assessed. It was critical to our process that stakeholder input was incorporated at every stage.
From that foundation, research shifted to development and implementation.
Between August 2022 and April 2023, we conducted four pilot test administrations involving more than 2,500 final-year law students and recent graduates. These pilots evaluated new question formats, grading scales, timing assumptions, and the integration of legal resources within the testing environment. The objective was to ensure that new question types functioned reliably under realistic conditions.
In January 2024, we administered a nationwide field test to 4,016 participants at 88 volunteer law schools across the United States. Participants were randomly assigned different collections of test questions to ensure that performance differences reflected question difficulty rather than examinee ability. Researchers analyzed question difficulty, response times, grader performance, and performance across skill categories. The resulting data informed refinements to both content and scoring processes.
In June 2025, we published the NextGen UBE Blueprint: July 2026–February 2027, which establishes the official NextGen UBE score scale of 500–750 (replacing the 200–400 scale for the current bar exam), outlines the exam’s structure and question types, details point values and weighting, and describes delivery platform features and tools available to examinees.
Most recently, in January 2026, NCBE conducted a full beta test of the NextGen UBE in Boston, Dallas, New York City, and Miami. Fifteen hundred participants completed the exam across three days, generating a robust data set for final psychometric analysis.
The beta test evaluated not only exam content but also the full operational ecosystem: digital delivery, candidate and administrator portals, accessibility tools, offline functionality, and jurisdiction workflows. The delivery platform performed as designed, including during intentional Wi-Fi interruptions to confirm offline resilience. Accessibility tools—such as adjustable text features and integrated accommodations support—were seamlessly incorporated into the testing experience.
The content scope of the NextGen UBE reflects the profession’s core foundations. It assesses fundamental legal concepts in Civil Procedure, Contracts, Evidence, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Real Property, Torts, and Business Associations; Family Law will be added in 2028. It also evaluates essential lawyering skills, including legal research, writing, issue spotting and analysis, investigation, client counseling, negotiation, dispute resolution, and client relationship management.
The development of the NextGen exam has involved input from hundreds of stakeholders, empirical data from tens of thousands of lawyers, and participation from more than 10,000 law students and recent graduates across pilot, field, and beta administrations. It reflects collaboration among bar admission authorities, legal educators, practitioners, psychometricians, and technologists.
We are very proud that as of this writing, 49 jurisdictions have announced plans to administer the NextGen UBE. The exam has been researched, tested, refined, and validated on a national scale. The legal profession—and the public it serves—deserve nothing less.
Judith A. Gundersen is President and CEO of NCBE.