State Bar of California recommends state supreme court pick NextGen UBE for 2028
California inched closer to moving away from its proprietary bar exam and adopting the new NextGen Uniform Bar Examination—without a state-specific component, for now.
On Thursday, the State Bar of California’s board of trustees unanimously voted to recommend to the California Supreme Court to administer the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ NextGen exam starting in July 2028.
The jurisdiction with the second-highest number of bar candidates is under the gun to decide, within the next two months, which bar exam to use going forward.
The urgency stems from the state’s failed February 2025 administration of a new, proprietary exam written by test prep company Kaplan and administered by Meazure Learning that 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 NCBE’s Multistate Bar Examination until the organization sunsets the UBE in 2028. 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 the California Supreme Court must decide by July.
The vote “is not the final step (though it is an important one),” wrote Susan Smith Bakhshian, the director of bar programs at the Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, to the ABA Journal.
The decision follows the guidance offered by deans of 16 California’s ABA-accredited law schools in public comments submitted to the board and the committee.
“The NextGen UBE questions have been piloted and studied to ensure that they are fair, equitable and meet psychometric standards for reliability and validity,” the deans wrote in a letter dated April 14. “The portability that the NextGen UBE offers is beneficial and would reduce the financial burden on new lawyers.”
The deans noted that the “the experience with Kaplan has been extremely problematic” and added that its questions contained “substantial errors.”
“Even after repeated problems were identified in practice materials, the final test questions were poorly drafted, contained mistakes of law, and omitted material facts,” they stated.
Bakhshian wrote in her public comments that “California is out of time. First-year law students are taking exams now and have completed one-third of their law school education, without knowing what their licensure exam will require.”
But many of the public comments disapproved of setting the California bar exam aside, including one note signed by members of 63 bar associations who “strongly oppose the rushed decision-making process proposed by the state bar for making a decision regarding whether to depart from the California bar exam and adopt entirely new, costly and unproven exam options that are under consideration.”
The first administration of the NextGen UBE is scheduled for July, and 50 jurisdictions have plans to move to the new skills-focused exam.
Work to develop a California-specific portion of the exam will continue, but any additional test would have to be approved by the state supreme court two years before administration.
Reuters and Bloomberg Law also have coverage.
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