As deadline looms, California bar will research 2 exam options
With a decision deadline nearing in the wake of the flopped launch of its proprietary bar exam last year, California leaders on Friday chose not one but two options to explore as it prepares for the July 2028 administration of the test.
The State Bar of California’s Committee of Bar Examiners voted to recommend the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ new NextGen Uniform Bar Examination without a California state-specific component, while the board of trustees elected to get more information on the NextGen bar exam, as well as creating its own exam, using questions developed by Kaplan.
“This decision will never be easy,” wrote Susan Smith Bakshian, the director of bar programs at the Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, in an email to the ABA Journal. “Waiting for more information until the May meeting is going to make a bad situation even worse.”
The state must make a decision about which exam to use—and soon. Under California law, there must be at least a notice of two years before the state can make substantial changes to how the exam is administered, meaning that bar officials must make a recommendation to the California Supreme Court with enough time to make the final decision by July 2026.
February 2025’s administration of the new exam experienced a host of troubles, including technical glitches and revelations that some questions written by artificial intelligence with help from nonlawyers. After that, the California Supreme Court ordered a return to the Multistate Bar Examination until the NCBE sunsets the Uniform Bar Exam in 2028.
In a survey released last week, 71% of deans of California’s ABA-accredited law schools preferred using the NextGen UBE, while about half of the state’s bar leaders preferred a plan to create a California-specific test in the long term and use Kaplan to develop a “bridge” exam in the short term over a move to the NextGen.
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