Onward to the Bar
As the bar exam transitions to the NextGen format, I want to outline both the opportunities it presents and the challenges it poses for legal education. Chief among these challenges – as is often the case – are the uncertainties. Ten jurisdictions will implement the NextGen Bar Exam beginning with the July 2026 administration (Connecticut, Guam, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Palau, the Virgin Islands and Washington). Most other states will follow in 2027 and 2028. Oklahoma will officially adopt the exam in February 2027, while Texas plans to transition with the July 2028 administration. The unknowns are straightforward – bar takers have never taken the NextGen Bar, so this represents new terrain for both test takers and law schools.
So, what’s changed with the NextGen Bar? Essentially, there are three big changes that have happened. First, the content that is subject to testing has been pared down to foundational subjects that will compose the testing structure. Those subjects are business associations and relationships, civil procedure, constitutional law, contract law, criminal law and constitutional protections of accused persons, evidence, real property, torts and professional responsibility. This is a shift as subjects like secured transactions, decedents estates and trusts will not be tested. Some of the material will be tested as recall memory (knowledge of doctrines, tests and applications) while other content will be evaluated on the tester’s ability to apply a doctrinal area where the law is provided.
That leads to the second big shift in the bar exam in that the exam will also incorporate foundational skills testing. These skills include legal research, legal writing, issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, client relationship and management. These skills will be tested in a variety of ways, including direct application to simulation-type problems and questions; asking students to choose the best approach or application from a range of solutions; and assess and justify the kinds of approaches a lawyer should take given a set of parameters.
The third big shift in the bar exam is the structure of how these questions will be presented to students. The NextGen Bar will offer three kinds of scored question sets to test the skills of bar takers:
- Integrated question sets that may test multiple content areas and make up 21% of the overall score;
- Performance tasks that appear in two formats: standard performance tasks, which focus on a single longer writing assignment, and legal research performance tasks, which include several multiple-choice and short-answer questions followed by a medium-answer writing assignment. The performance tasks make up 30% of the overall score; and
- Standalone multiple-choice questions that only test one area and make up 49% of the bar score. (Additionally, the types of multiple-choice questions have changed; takers are not asked to pick a single answer but will select several answers offered.)
One thing that makes this bar exam different is that these question sets are not in siloed exams, but rather integrated into a parts of the exam. In the most recent UBE and Multi-State Bar Exams, takers would take all the multiple-choice questions at once, all of the Multi-State Essays at once and all the Multi-State Practice Test at once. The NextGen Bar will instead have parts of the exam that feature all three types of questions.
In January, The University of Tulsa’s College of Law signed on with Access Lex’s Helix Bar program to provide every student who graduates a top-end bar preparation program. As a part of our program, we offer bar simulation courses as well as an integration with our academic support program for both pre-1L, 1L, 2L and 3L academic and bar support services. Bar takers who have access to Lex/Helix have enjoyed great success in the past few years with other law schools posting significant increases in bar success.
As we approach this new frontier of the bar exam, law schools are increasingly recognizing the need to be methodical in the way we prepare students. As we join forces with Access Lex/Helix, we are striving to not see the bar exam as the end point but the base line goal for what it means to produce competent, practice-ready lawyers and practitioners. In addition to the enhancements to our bar program, UTulsa is proud to recognize new initiatives that build our students’ bar-ready skills while also strengthening their curiosity and creativity in the law. That includes recent partnerships with the American Arbitration Association to build student mediation skills, the expansion of our externship program to offer more than 300 annual extern opportunities for students, the development of new courses like the Judicial Clerkship Practicum, the Advanced Property Problems Practicum, a seminar on peace keeping courts and food and agricultural law to name a few, as well as the growth of our clinical programs to build skills in client counseling, problem solving and advocacy.