The bar exam just changed for the first time in a generation.
This July, in ten US jurisdictions, some aspiring lawyers sat a bar exam that no attorney now in practice has ever taken. It is called the NextGen UBE, and it rewrites what the test is for.
A quiet debut
In the last days of July 2026, in a short list of places, a group of law graduates opened their laptops and began a bar exam that looks meaningfully different from the one every lawyer now in practice once endured.
The National Conference of Bar Examiners, the nonprofit that develops the exam used across most of the country, calls it the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination. July 2026 is its first live administration. Ten jurisdictions went first: Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, Washington, and the US territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Virgin Islands. Dozens more have announced adoption in 2027 or 2028, so the rest of the country will follow in stages rather than all at once.
For a credential that has looked essentially the same for decades, and that stands between law school and the right to practice, that is a significant morning.
From "what you memorized" to "what you can do"
The exam most lawyers remember rewards recall. Across two days, examinees answer a large bank of multiple-choice questions spanning many subjects, write a series of timed essays, and complete a closed-universe performance task, reproducing rules held in short-term memory under heavy time pressure.
The NextGen exam keeps the rigor but moves the target. It tests a deliberately shorter set of foundational subjects, business associations, civil procedure, constitutional law, contracts, criminal law and constitutional criminal procedure, evidence, real property, and torts, and pairs them with a defined set of foundational lawyering skills the old format never measured directly. Those skills include legal research, legal writing, issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, and client relationship and management.
The question is shifting from how much law a graduate can hold in memory to whether they can do the things lawyers actually do with it.
Some subjects make that shift explicit. Through at least early 2028, family law and trusts and estates are tested with the relevant legal resources provided to the examinee, closer to how a lawyer meets an unfamiliar question in real life: by looking it up and reasoning well, rather than by having committed it to memory. Under NCBE's published timeline, family law is scheduled to fold into the fully tested foundational subjects in July 2028.
What actually changes on exam day
The format is shorter and different in feel. The NextGen exam runs a day and a half, two three-hour sessions on the first day and one on the second, rather than the traditional two full days. Candidates take it on their own laptops at proctored, in-person locations, through a secure testing platform that also delivers accommodations and assistive formats.
The old strict separation of multiple choice, essays, and skills gives way to integrated question sets: a realistic scenario, a short set of documents, and a series of questions that ask the examinee to research, analyze, and produce work against it, alongside standalone questions and performance tasks. Scoring is consolidated into a single number on a scale from 500 to 750. Each jurisdiction sets its own passing line, and NCBE has recommended a range of 610 to 620; Oregon, for example, set 615 for the July 2026 exam. As before, the score a graduate needs still depends on where they sit.
Skills over recall
Alongside the law itself, it tests research, writing, client counseling, and negotiation: the things lawyers actually do, not just what they can memorize.
Fewer subjects, some open-resource
A shorter list of foundational subjects. Family law and trusts and estates are tested with legal resources provided, closer to real practice.
One and a half days
Three three-hour sessions, taken on the candidate's own laptop on a secure platform, replacing the old two-day pencil-and-booklet format.
One score, 500 to 750
A single scaled score, portable between participating jurisdictions, with each jurisdiction still setting its own passing line.
What stays the same
For all that changes, the architecture around the exam is familiar. Individual jurisdictions still administer the test and grade the written portions, still set their own passing scores, and still layer on their own requirements, including character and fitness review and, in some places, a separate local-law component. Score portability continues: the NextGen UBE replaces the current Uniform Bar Examination as the basis for transferring a score between participating jurisdictions, and during the transition many will keep accepting current UBE scores for a defined period. The stakes are unchanged. It remains a high-consequence licensure exam that most graduates must pass to practice.
Why now
The change did not arrive overnight. NCBE developed the NextGen exam over several years through multiple rounds of research and field testing, following the same practices used to build licensure exams in medicine, accounting, and other professions. The effort responded to a long-running conversation in legal education and practice: that a memorization-heavy test measured something narrower than readiness to represent a client, and that it had drifted from how law is actually practiced, where a competent lawyer researches and reasons rather than recites.
Reasonable people in the profession see it differently, and both views deserve a fair hearing. Supporters describe an exam that finally resembles the work new lawyers will do. Others are watching to see whether a skills-based test can be scored as reliably and as fairly, across thousands of candidates and many jurisdictions, as the format it replaces. The staggered rollout means the first years will produce exactly the data that debate has lacked.
For most of its history, the bar exam has been a memory test standing between law school and a license. Starting this month, in a few places first and more to come, it is trying to become something closer to a rehearsal for the job itself.
Whether it succeeds is a story that will be written one July at a time.
Archivar
The Archivar Editorial Desk
Researched and fact-checked against primary sources. General information for attorneys, not legal advice.
Sources: National Conference of Bar Examiners, NextGen UBE materials, participating jurisdictions, and scoring guidance published by NCBE at ncbex.org.
