This week, about 3,500 potential lawyers will take the new licensure exam, which aims to reward the use of skills over memorization.
The two-day, digital edition of the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam, which has been in development since 2018, will air in 10 smaller jurisdictions — including Maryland, Missouri and Oregon — on Tuesday. Next summer, 13 more states will begin offering it. And by July 2028, nearly every state in the country—including California, Florida and Texas—will have replaced the bar exam with the NextGen Bar Exam.
Although the National Council of Bar Examiners has made some changes to the multi-state exam since it created it in the early 1970s, it has never made a change of this magnitude. Instead of physical test sheets, students will take everything on computers. The new test will take nine hours over a day and a half to complete, rather than 12 hours over two days. And instead of requiring candidates to memorize mountains of legal theory, the focus is on testing lawyers’ practical skills.
For the most part, law students, faculty and the broader legal community welcome the redesigned exam, which lawyers must pass to practice law in most states.
“The changes in the current exams reflect the same kind of changes that the law school has been making for the past 20 years. There has been a greater focus on clinical skills and experiential learning,” said Jon J. Lee, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law who is helping the NCBE develop and implement the exam. “The current test benefits students who can memorize a lot of doctrine without students who can effectively use resources, investigate cases and advise clients. I hope that the new test will be a more effective way to test skills, which is not having all the information in your head.”
More than 10,000 students and recent graduates have taken the mid-term version of the exam over the past four years, and according to those Lee spoke to, “the new one is a lot like practicing law,” he said.
Less Memorization, More Skills
While the exam’s focus on the memorization process begins amid a broader shift toward competency-based testing in the era of AI productivity, NCBE’s decision to redesign the bar exam predates the technology’s widespread use.
“Any testing organization, especially one like ours that works in the field of licensing executive exams, has a responsibility to ensure that the test remains reliable for entry-level training,” Judith Gundersen, president and CEO of NCBE, said. Within Higher Ed. Starting in 2018, “we spent a year listening to people—law teachers, judges, teachers, bar examiners, courts—and we asked them what they liked and disliked about the test and what they would change if they passed.”
The main themes that emerged from those discussions were that “current bar exams test more deeply and more broadly in legal theory,” he said. While it “does a good job of testing a lawyer’s specific skills such as legal reasoning, legal analysis, issue analysis and legal writing, it can be very testy in terms of legal skills.”
In the eight years since, NCBE has used that feedback and others from outside experts to develop the NextGen test.
Like the current test, the redesigned one still contains a mix of multiple-choice and written-answer questions. But unlike the current test, which requires candidates to “know all the cold topics” without consulting any secondary resources, Gundersen said that the NextGen test only expects “deep knowledge” of selected topics, which the examiners know in advance. Meanwhile, for some more complex or obscure topics, candidates “need to at least know enough to understand what the issues are and use the embedded resources we provide.”
In addition, the NextGen Bar contains a new category that requires candidates to demonstrate legal research skills. It also has integrated question sets designed to simulate a day in the life of a lawyer when candidates are asked how they would handle developments in a typical case.
The New Test Is Not Easy
Some critics have suggested that the new test’s de-emphasis on memorization will make it easier—a claim Susan Smith Bakhshian, professor and director of bar programs at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, disputes.
“In many ways it could be very difficult,” said Bakhshian, who has long advocated for bar reform. “This will require students to demonstrate a different ability. That requires getting used to a new test format and samples and practicing in that new format. And there aren’t many samples and exercises available right now.”
Law schools in California still have two years to prepare students for the new test, which won’t begin there—or in other major jurisdictions including Florida, New York and Texas—until 2028. And after surviving California’s ambitious effort to offer remote bar testing last year, Bakhshian said his biggest concern about rolling out the NextGen Bar in the next two years is scale. That’s because the test is all digital, an update from Scantron’s pencil-and-paper delivery format for legacy tests.
For now, however, “It is important to give the NCBE the benefit of the doubt that they will use the 2026 and 2027 exams to resolve it and make sure they are aggressive in checking minor issues,” he said. “Because what might be a small problem if you do six or 20 states will be very different in 2028.”
At the same time, the all-digital format of the new test offers several advantages to students and legal educators, said Kellye Y. Testy, CEO and executive director of the Association of American Law Schools.
“Most students today are digital-savvy. You want the examiners to have as little anxiety as possible, and for many students the digital format feels familiar,” he said. Within Higher Ed. “Digital formats also allow you to collect data and quickly understand how people perform on the test and any psychometric issues it has and allow you to make changes.”
And while operational challenges may arise over the next two years, Testy said they likely won’t outweigh the benefits of the new test’s focus on skills use.
“It’s a limited improvement on what we have,” he said. “I hope we don’t have to wait another twenty years to change the tests.”
