Law’s Big Test Goes Back to School

More than two centuries after the first bar examination was conducted in the Delaware Colony, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) is rolling out a new test – the NextGen bar exam – that will focus less on memorizing legal doctrine than on being versed in the practical applications of law.

“It’s making us reevaluate how we prepare our students,” says Kamina Pinder, an Emory Law professor of practice who in July took on the added role of director of academic excellence. “Changing the bar at all is always going to have a tremendous impact on legal education, but this change is particularly significant because it’s shifting the focus.” Georgia will begin administering NextGen in 2028; five states will become the first to use the test starting in 2026. NextGen will replace the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), which NCBE introduced in 2011. “We’re always looking to improve what we do well, but we’re also looking at it with an eye toward, ‘Is it also going to prepare them for what they need to pass this new iteration of the bar exam?’” says Pinder, who has long taught bar preparation courses, in addition to grading bar exams. The exam will continue to focus on core legal concepts that include civil procedure, constitutional law, torts, and criminal law, while including new subject matter, such as contract law and family law. But there will be more. The test also will assess “lawyering skills,” such as legal research, writing, client counseling, issue spotting, and negotiation. “Let’s face it: Lawyers don’t take multiple choice tests when they come out of law school,” Pinder says. “It’s not really practice oriented, but it does serve a purpose engaging how much the students know.” On its website, NCBE puts it thusly: “The exam will reflect many of the key changes that law schools are making today, building on the successes of clinical legal education programs, alternative dispute resolution programs, and legal writing and analysis programs.”

“They said they were taking some subjects off the bar,” Pinder says. “Some of that has changed, and there has been a little bit of back and forth. We are trying to pivot as quickly as possible to be responsive to what is ultimately going to be the type of bar exam that most of the students in the country are going to have to take.” Under the leadership of Richard D. Freer, dean and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory is moving apace into the new era. Two courses have been added to the curriculum: Survey of Integrated Legal Concepts (which is being taught now by Pinder and focuses on test-taking strategies), and Survey of Integrated Legal Skills, which will be introduced in 2025. Pinder, meantime, says that she is working closely with colleagues to help them “reshape” student assessments to make them more consistent with the bar exam. The new coursework is part of the law school’s Student Flourishing initiative launched in August by Freer. In addition to the new coursework, faculty are engaged in a “ground-up” assessment of the existing curriculum to ensure that students are best equipped beyond Emory. The initiative calls for enhancing mentoring and creating a “pipeline of support” for undergraduates considering law school, for students during their legal education, and for graduates. Helping in the curricular reassessment is John Acevedo, associate dean of students and academic programs. The effort will begin in earnest in 2025 – a full three years before the first Emory students will take the NextGen exam. 

“We’re going to take a look at which courses we may need to add, and whether we need to adjust unit load requirements,” says Acevedo, who teaches constitutional law and criminal law. “Because the NextGen bar is going to test not only substantive knowledge, but also lawyering skills, we’re going to have to start thinking how we teach subjects.” Since he took the bar exam in 2004, Acevedo says that employers, in part due to the wealth of online legal documents, want graduates to be more self-sufficient “and more ready to go on day one.” The new bar exam is indicative of that, he adds. “‘Practice ready’ was the catchphrase from a couple of years ago,” Acevedo says. “The idea is that we want not just theoretically trained lawyers, but lawyers who know how to interact with clients and do research on their own.” As for the Emory Law curriculum, “we don’t need to completely overhaul it. What we’re looking at right now is how we test the current subjects.” Acevedo expects NextGen to be revised over time. Some legal topics, such as the Second Amendment’s protections for bearing arms, “fall out of favor because they’re so contested,” he says. “You need questions for which there’s a fairly clear answer.” NextGen, for its newness, still will test the foundational tenets of law. Half of the Uniform Bar Exam requires essay responses, while the balance of the test poses 200 standalone multiple-choice questions. For the NextGen exam, about 40% of the test will be standalone multiple-choice questions. Roughly a quarter of the exam time will be allotted to integrated question sets, while a third will be devoted to “longer performance tasks,” in which students, for example, are given excerpts from a fictitious case, and then they are asked to write a legal document or memo. “The NextGen bar exam is going to have more of an emphasis on this time of writing, in which students are given more of the law and they have to produce a document that synthesizes all of the law,” Pinder says. “Obviously, preparing students for practice is a major part of them flourishing,” she adds, noting that the school has prepared a new exam skills program for 1Ls. The effort will focus on more timed writing exercises, which she calls a “fundamental” change to the way first years are taught. “Lawyers usually look things up: they look up rules, laws, and regulations, and then they create a written document, whether it’s a memo, motion, or a brief,” Pinder says. “They have to find a way to integrate all of this information in a logically structured way.” Emily Bramer, a director in the Center for Professional Development, offers career advisement to 3Ls and recent graduates. The new bar exam is a focus of interest among students. In 2024, there were 288 graduates, 95% of whom took the bar exam. Many students secure jobs after taking the bar exam, Bramer say. The NextGen bar exam is taking on more components of the Multistate Performance Test, one of three components of the UBE (and 20% of the overall UBE score) that tests “real world” legal tasks. NextGen is “trying to replicate more of the MPTs, in that it’s less reliant on memorization,” she says. “It’s more focused on the skills. And you take information and produce a work product similar to what you would as a new attorney.” Bramer, who graduated from Emory Law in 2002, is not limited to sharing bar exam information with students. Student success happens in other ways. She also works with writing instructors to ensure that students adopt the right tone in correspondence with potential employers. “Some of the writing instructors teach them how to write a formal email, because they’re used to texting.” she says. “They’re sending emails that sound like texts.” 

With changes afoot, Bramer says she is encouraging more students to use the center. She sent an email this semester to 2Ls and 3Ls about the importance of being strategic, and bar exam preparation techniques. “We saw the number of appointments skyrocket,” she says. “Our advisers the past couple of months have had back-to-back appointments. The message is getting out. We’re being more proactive about educating them about what the bar exam is.”