NextGen UBE 'blueprint' welcome, but more info on new bar exams needed, sources say
The National Conference of Bar Examiners’ “blueprint” for the NextGen UBE offers welcome info about how the new test will be different than the current Uniform Bar Exam, legal academics say. But they also say that critical pieces of information, such as a broader variety of sample questions and specific study materials, are still missing—and can’t come soon enough for law schools and bar candidates.
“[The] 2026 bar-takers deserved to have this information in 2023,” Marsha Griggs, an associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law and immediate past president of the Association of Academic Support Educators, wrote to the ABA Journal.
The NCBE began planning in 2018 for the new exam, which emphasizes skills new lawyers need over memorization, and its first administration is scheduled for July 2026. At press time, 41 jurisdictions have committed to the test that will cover eight areas of doctrine and evaluate seven foundational lawyering skills. The Uniform Bar Examination and its components—the Multistate Essay Examination, the Multistate Performance Test and the Multistate Bar Examination—will sunset in 2028.
“The details found in the blueprint are grounded in data we’ve gathered over thousands of hours of development and pretesting,” said Kara McWilliams, the NCBE’s chief product officer, in a press release. “They are designed to provide clear guidance for educators and candidates preparing for the NextGen exam.”
“Way more samples are needed,” says Marsha Griggs, an associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law and immediate past president of the Association of Academic Support Educators. “We don’t have enough information to do more than speculate about what candidates will need to prepare for this exam.” (Photo by Jeannie Liataud Photography/ABA Journal)
Not California
The NextGen UBE launch follows the State Bar of California’s disastrous February administration of its new hybrid and remote exam. Authored by Kaplan Exam Services and deployed by Meazure Learning, the exam was plagued with logistical and technical issues as financial pressures forced the cash-strapped state to rush the launch of the test, which did not include NCBE questions.
Sources contacted by the ABA Journal applaud the NCBE’s steady and thoughtful efforts to launch a new exam.
“We will not see a repeat in any way, shape or form, of what happened in California with the NCBE at the helm,” says Susannah Pollvogt, principal consultant for academics and curriculum for the Law School Admission Council’s Legal Education Consulting group.
While admirable, sources say, that deliberateness has a downside, slowing the release of information, which hamstrings law school educators’ and bar candidates’ abilities to thoroughly prep for the new exam.
One key resource that’s still missing is the “sourcebooks of law” aiming to eliminate the guesswork on which legal principles will be tested. Those will start rolling out in August, says Judith Gundersen, the NCBE president and chief operation officer.
The books are constructed to support “the broader legal community and law faculty in particular as we transition to the NextGen UBE,” she adds, with real property and contracts being the first books released and the final book, family law, coming in early 2026.
But that’s information that could be used right now, says Deborah Jones Merritt, a professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a 2025 ABA Journal Legal Rebel. “I’m puzzled that NCBE hasn’t released these already,” she adds. “They would be very helpful for both candidates and faculty supporting them. And they might reduce some of the pressure to purchase commercial bar prep courses.”
More questions, please
A new sample legal research performance task, which has four multiple-choice questions, one short-answer question and one medium-answer writing assignment, is included in the blueprint, released June 3. Other samples are available on the NCBE website. One performance task will appear in each three-hour exam section, according to the NCBE.
“Way more samples are needed,” Griggs wrote. “We don’t have enough information to do more than speculate about what candidates will need to prepare for this exam.”
Joan Howarth, a professor emerita at the University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law who wrote the 2022 book Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, agrees.
“The more examples NCBE provides, the better for everyone,” she says. “The sooner NCBE provides their study guides of material to be covered, scheduled for 2025-26, the better.”
Those samples are on their way, Gundersen says. Six more hours of exam questions will be released in August, bringing the total up to 12 hours of practice content, she adds.
Still, historically, candidates have had hundreds of multiple-choices questions plus dozens of essays and performance tests to prep for the UBE, Pollvogt says. “But graduates taking the exam in July of 2026 are not going to have that wealth of materials.”
Along with the sample questions, the NCBE plans to release more materials in August—an official examinees guide and a final content scope outline, Gundersen says.
Adjust curricula
Many of the item sets and performance tasks cross doctrinal subjects, a move that’s authentic to practice, Merritt says. While she applauds that change, “schools should give students more experience applying knowledge and skills from multiple courses to a single client problem.”
But topics in classes are often siloed, Pollvogt says. “Skills are taught here, writing is taught here, research is taught here,” she says. “Your typical doctrinal faculty member might not commonly incorporate research tasks into their classroom.” She adds that students should be exposed to the types of questions on the bar during the three years of law school.
Merritt notes that 2026 grads sitting for the exam will have finished courses related to the exam a year or more before the test.
“It’s too late now to reteach those courses in a different way,” says the co-author of the landmark 2020 Building a Better Bar study.
“I’m puzzled that NCBE hasn’t released these already,” says Deborah Jones Merritt, a professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a 2025 ABA Journal Legal Rebel. “They would be very helpful for both candidates and faculty supporting them. And they might reduce some of the pressure to purchase commercial bar prep courses.” (Photo by Maddie McGarvey)
Need for speed
While the blueprint revealed that the NCBE set the score scale between 500 and 750 points, each jurisdiction ultimately determines its own pass score, “a very tricky aspect of licensing where the legal profession has been weak,” says Howarth, a 2025 Journal Legal Rebel.
She finds the NCBE’s plans for scoring “sensible,” but they will require “jurisdictions to grapple with standard setting in ways few have done before.”
“NCBE will be working with jurisdictions to provide insights from the October 2024 prototype exam and May 2025 standard-setting study to help inform those decisions,” Gundersen says.
But how the score will be tallied raises some eyebrows. Multiple-choice questions make up 40% of the new exam in terms of timing but account for 49% of the score, something Pollvogt finds “unfortunate.”
“I’m not quite sure why that would be weighted more heavily, especially in light of the fact that the NextGen bar exam is supposed to move away from memorization,” she says.
And the overall timing of the test is changing. The new exam shifts the test from 12 hours over two full days to nine hours over one and a half days, with two three-hour sessions on the first day and one three-hour session on the second day.
“It places much more emphasis on the ability to read and digest primary sources in real time, and 51% of the score on the exam will depend on those particular skills,” Pollvogt says.
Merritt is concerned about the need for speed.
“Even minutes will matter on this exam,” she says. “Speed is not part of minimum competence for lawyering. We want to license lawyers who are thoughtful and take the time to research client issues.”
Costly affair?
Students and states are waiting for more information on how much the exam will cost to take and administer, sources say.
“For the applicants, that’s a great concern,” LSAC’s Pollvogt says. “It’s already very, very difficult to financially survive while studying for and taking the bar exam and waiting for results.”
The costs are also vital information for jurisdictions.
“State supreme courts and public servants need to be upfront about what they are spending on this exam,” Griggs says, “and I struggle deeply to understand how state supreme courts can announce (or even consider) the adoption of any new bar exam without first having full details on the costs to the state and to the examinees.”
Just like the current exam, examinees will pay for the use of the software and jurisdictions pay for the exam itself, wrapping that cost into application fees, typically including fees for character and fitness investigations, facilities and staffing, Gundersen says.
“Jurisdictions may elect to increase their application fees to reflect the modest increase in the cost of the exam, but NCBE has not yet heard of any jurisdiction that has done so,” she adds.
The NextGen UBE will be completely conducted on computers. After California’s bar exam’s tech issues in February, academics are cautiously keeping their fingers crossed that the NextGen UBE tech will be more reliable than the NCBE’s attempts during the pandemic to computerize bar exams.
Later this summer, more tutorials walking through the software will be available publicly, Gundersen says.
“NCBE team is going to great lengths to see the platform operate without hiccup. It could look like 2020 all over again,” Griggs says. “It is wishful thinking to assume that NCBE’s first launch of a fully computerized exam, using a new software provider, is going to be without glitch.
“We hope for the best,” she adds.
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