The New Bar Exam Is Here

This week, about 3,500 prospective lawyers will sit for a brand-new licensure exam, which aims to reward the application of skills over rote memorization.

The two-day, digital NextGen Uniform Bar Exam, which has been in development since 2018, is set to debut in 10 smaller jurisdictions—including Maryland, Missouri and Oregon—on Tuesday. Next summer, 13 more states will start offering it. And by July 2028, nearly every state in the country—including California, Florida and Texas—will have replaced the current bar exam with the NextGen Bar Exam.

Although the National Council of Bar Examiners has made some changes to the multistate exam since creating it in the early 1970s, it has never undertaken an overhaul of this magnitude. Instead of physical test sheets, students will take it all on computers. The new exam 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 doctrine, it is more focused on testing practical lawyering skills.

For the most part, law students, faculty and the wider legal community are welcoming the redesigned exam, which lawyers have to pass in order to practice law in the majority of states.

“The changes to the current exam mirror the same kind of changes law school had been making over the past 20 years. There’s been much more 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 exam advantages students who can memorize a lot of doctrine to the exclusion of students who can work well with resources, investigate cases and advise clients. I’m hopeful the new exam will be a more effective way to assess competence, which isn’t about having all of the knowledge in your mind.”

More than 10,000 students and recent graduates have already taken a version of the exam during its testing phases over the past four years, and according to the ones Lee spoke to, “the new one is more like the practice of law,” he said.

Less Memorization, More Skills

While the exam’s focus on process over memorization is debuting amid a broader shift toward skills-based assessments in the era of generative AI, NCBE’s decision to redesign the bar exam predates widespread use of the technology.

“Any testing organization, particularly one like ours that works in the licensure arena for a high-stakes exam, has a responsibility to ensure that the exam remains faithful to entry-level practice,” Judith Gundersen, president and CEO of NCBE, told Inside Higher Ed. Starting in 2018, “we spent a year listening to people—legal educators, deans, faculty, bar examiners, courts—and asked them what they liked and didn’t like about the exam and what they would change if they could.”

The big themes that emerged from those conversations were that “the current bar exam tests too deeply and too broadly in legal doctrine,” she said. Although it “does a good job of testing some lawyering skills like legal reasoning, legal analysis, issue spotting and legal writing, it could test more robustly in terms of legal skills.”

In the eight years since, the NCBE has used that feedback and other input from outside experts to craft the NextGen exam.

Like the current exam, the redesigned one still contains a mix of multiple-choice and written response questions. But unlike the current exam, which requires candidates to “know all of the topic areas cold” without consulting any secondary resources, Gundersen said the NextGen exam only expects that “deep-level knowledge” for select topics, which test takers know about ahead of time. Meanwhile, for other, more complex or obscure topics, candidates “need to at least know enough to understand what the issues are and then use some embedded resources that we provide.”

In addition, the NextGen Bar contains a new section that requires candidates to demonstrate legal research skills. It also features integrated question sets designed to simulate a day in the life of a lawyer in which candidates are asked how they would handle developments in a typical case.

New Exam Not Easier

Some critics have suggested that the new exam’s de-emphasis on memorization will make it easier—a claim Susan Smith Bakhshian, a professor and director of bar programs at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, disputes.

“In many ways it may be more difficult,” said Bakhshian, who has long advocated for bar reform. “This is going to require students to demonstrate a different skill. That requires getting used to the new exam format and samples and practice in that new format. And there are not a lot of samples and practice available yet.”

Law schools in California still have two years to get students ready for the new test, which won’t debut there—or in other large jurisdictions including Florida, New York and Texas—until 2028. And after living through California’s botched attempt to offer a remote bar exam last year, Bakhshian said her biggest concern about the NextGen Bar’s rollout over the next two years is scale. That’s in part because the test is all digital, an update from the pencil-and-paper Scantron delivery format of the legacy exam.

For now, though, “It’s important to give the NCBE the benefit of the doubt that they will use the 2026 and 2027 exams to troubleshoot it and make sure they are aggressive in evaluating even small problems,” she said. “Because what might be a small problem when you’re doing six states or 20 states is going to be markedly different in 2028.”

At the same time, the all-digital format of the new exam presents several advantages for 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 test takers to have as little anxiety as possible, and for most students a digital format feels more familiar,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “Digital formats also allow you to collect data and understand more rapidly how people are performing on the exam and any psychometric issues it has and allow you to make adjustments.”

And even if logistical challenges do arise over the next two years, Testy said it likely won’t outweigh the benefit of the new test’s focus on skills application.

“It’s a measurable improvement over what we’ve had,” she said. “I hope we don’t wait another two decades to evolve the exam.”