Details emerge about new national bar exam, with anticipation high

By Karen Sloan

June 4 (Reuters) - Bar exam officials have released details about structure and scoring of the new national test set to debut in July 2026, which will mark its first major redesign in 25 years.

The NextGen UBE, as the new exam is officially called, will be significantly shorter than the current Uniform Bar Exam, according to a new test blueprint released on Tuesday by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. It will also place greater scoring weight on the performance task portion of the test than the existing exam.

The redesign of the national bar exam, which started in 2021, aims to rely more on practical legal skills and less on the memorization of laws.

So far, 41 states and territories across the country have announced plans to transition to the NextGen UBE between July 2026 and July 2028, when the national conference will stop offering the current bar exam.

The new testing time, which will be shortened to 9 hours from 12 for the old test, will consist of a trio of three-hour testing sessions for the exam’s three types of questions — multiple choice, integrated questions, and performance tasks, the blueprint shows.

The blueprint answers many of the questions law faculty have had for the past three years about the new test, said Saint Louis University School of Law professor Marsha Griggs on Wednesday, adding that the Association of Academic Support Educators has been pushing the national conference to provide more information.

"The public — especially those who are preparing for this new exam — have generally been in the dark on important points like scoring, timing, and content for too long,” Griggs said. This information should have been available in 2023 when the first cohort of NextGen UBE takers started law school, she said.

Kara McWilliams, the national conference's chief product officer, said the new exam details are based on data gathered "over thousands of hours of development and pretesting." She said the information is "designed to provide clear guidance" for legal educators and people preparing for the bar exam.

Among the scoring changes, the new test will include 120 multiple-choice questions, down from the current 200, and performance tasks will be 30% of the total exam score, up from 20%.

The national conference will continue to score the multiple-choice questions and calculate final scores, while individual jurisdictions will grade the integrated question sets and performance tasks, according to the blueprint.

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