After last year's bar exam disaster, state must adopt NextGen

The failure of the California State Bar (Bar) to adopt the NextGen Bar exam and the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) truly makes no sense. Forty-one states have already adopted it, and although virtually every law school dean in the state has urged the same course, the Bar has still refused to act. The California Supreme Court should use its authority to adopt it.

In summer 2024, the Bar decided to stop using the National Conference of Bar Examiners' Multistate Bar Exam and signed a contract with Kaplan Test Preparation Center to prepare its questions. This was done to save money. Many, including me, objected to abandoning an entity experienced in preparing licensing exams for an entity with no experience in doing so. This shift was to begin with the February 2025 bar exam. Kaplan gave a practice exam in fall 2024, with the Bar promising extra points for those who participated. By all accounts it went poorly.

But it was nothing compared to the February 2025 bar exam, which was a disaster. Students described many poorly drafted questions. After the exam, the Bar admitted that a psychometrician used artificial intelligence to draft 23 questions that were used on the exam. The drafter worked for ACS Ventures, which had been hired by the Bar to evaluate the exam questions. Also, 48 of the questions were recycled from the Bar's First Year Law Student's exam, the so-called "baby bar exam" given to students attending non-ABA-accredited law schools.

The administration of the exam also was a nightmare. ProcturU Inc., doing business as Meazure Learning, was contracted to administer the exam remotely. Many taking the exam could not access the platform, or had system crashes, or were given conflicting instructions. A critical feature that should have allowed candidates to copy and paste text into response fields was not working.

In response to this fiasco, on March 4, the California Supreme Court directed that for the summer 2025 bar exam the state would revert back to an in-person exam using the Multistate Bar Exam prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. In October 2025, California enacted a law requiring the State Bar of California's Committee of Bar Examiners to provide two years' notice before switching from in-person to online testing and to give 18 months' notice before changing the vendor that provides the exam's multiple-choice questions. It also requires the state bar to give notice if artificial intelligence is used to create exam questions or in grading.

The question, then, is what the Bar will do beginning with the July 2028 bar exam. The Bar conducted a survey of law school deans. Every dean of an ABA-accredited law school supported the use of professional test developers and there was strong support for this among deans of state accredited schools and unaccredited law schools. The National Conference of Bar Examiners is shifting from the Multistate Bar Exam to the NextGen Bar. It is part of a Uniform Bar Exam, which allows students to take their score to other jurisdictions and seek admission there. Each state decides for itself what is a passing score for admission to its bar.

On Jan. 23, 2026, there was a joint meeting of the Board of Trustees of the California Bar and the Committee of Bar Examiners to discuss the future of the bar exam. Six deans were invited to attend--two from ABA-accredited law schools, two from state-accredited law schools, and two from unaccredited law schools. Dean Brietta Clark, from Loyola Law School, and I represented the ABA-accredited schools. We strongly urged adoption of the NextGeneration Bar and the Uniform Bar Exam. The deans representing the state accredited schools took the same position. The deans from the unaccredited schools favored an approach like Nevada has adopted that includes exams on specific subjects and a supervised practice requirement for admission but said that they were closely divided between this option and the NextGen/UBE.

Rarely are deans of law schools virtually unanimous, but here they were in recommending the bar exam prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners because of its long experience in writing a licensing exam. It has spent years developing the new NextGen bar exam. Especially after the disaster of the February 2025 bar exam, no other alternative will have the necessary level of confidence. Moreover, the Uniform Bar Exam will facilitate mobility as students will be able to use their scores for admission to the bar in other states.

This should be easy. Why survey law school deans and invite testimony only to ignore their emphatic advice? Yet the Jan. 23 meeting still failed to resolve the issue.

The State Bar website describes the results of this meeting: "At its joint meeting on Friday, January 23, 2026, the Board of Trustees and the Committee of Bar Examiners (CBE) voted to explore a plan that could have the State Bar, beginning in 2028, administer the National Conference of Bar Examiners' NextGen Uniform Bar Examination (NextGen UBE), without a California-specific component. The Board also approved the possibility of a return to using questions developed by Kaplan Exam Services. The CBE's and Board's actions do not limit the final recommendation that they may make to the California Supreme Court based on their final review and evaluation of the many competing interests."

In other words, no decision was made. Board member Mark Toney made the astounding comment, "This may sound like sacrilege, but I am going to put it on the table: We don't have to offer a July '28 exam." Of course, the state has to offer a bar exam in July 2028 for all of those who have spent three years in law school with the expectation that they could take a bar exam.

We should expect better from the Board of Trustees and the Committee of Bar Examiners. The California Supreme Court should end this fiasco by specifying that beginning July 2028, California will use the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners.