Texas commits to NextGen bar exam starting in 2028, NCBE says
Texas will begin administering the NextGen bar exam starting in July 2028, joining 36 of the 56 jurisdictions that test bar candidates. (Image from Shutterstock)
Texas will begin administering the NextGen bar exam starting in July 2028, joining 36 of the 56 jurisdictions that test bar candidates, according to a March 11 press release from the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
The state, where 4,436 candidates took the exam in 2024, is the jurisdiction with the third-largest number of bar candidates behind New York and California, according to the NCBE. Texas has nine ABA-accredited law schools.
In 2024, about 64% of all test-takers took the bar in the 37 jurisdictions now committed to the NextGen bar exam, according to NCBE figures.
The Uniform Bar Examination and its components—the Multistate Essay Examination, the Multistate Performance Test and the Multistate Bar Examination—all sunset in 2028. The first administration of the NextGen bar exam is scheduled for July 2026 in nine jurisdictions.
The news from Texas comes amid the chaos following the State Bar of California’s flubbed February launch its exam.
Unlike the widely used NCBE’s Uniform Bar Examination, California’s hybrid test, written by Kaplan Exam Services and deployed by Meazure Learning, was designed to be taken remotely and at test centers. On March 4, a directive from the California Supreme Court ordered the state bar “to plan on administering the July 2025 California bar examination in the traditional in-person format.”
No decision on what exam would be used in person in July has been made to date. At press time, NCBE officials had not been contacted by the State Bar of California regarding the July administration, according to an email from Sophie Martin, the NCBE’s director of communications.
“I suspect some stakeholders in California will push for NextGen given the justifiable unhappiness with the February bar exam,” Deborah Jones Merritt, a 2025 ABA Journal Legal Rebel and a professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, told the Journal.
Previously, California’s Blue Ribbon Commission had concerns about the NextGen bar exam and endorsed creating a different exam for the state, she added.
The California bar fiasco could possibly encourage other states to move to the NCBE’s new offering, Merritt says.
The NextGen bar exam will have fewer stand-alone multiple-choice questions, and the traditional essay questions will be replaced with integrated question sets, requiring students to read and apply primary legal and factual resources to certain fact patterns under time pressure.
In each jurisdiction, the highest court has authority over the admission of attorneys to practice in its courts, aided by its bar admissions agency.
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