By Julianne Hill
The National Conference of Bar Examiners is carefully treading through a maze of tech challenges ahead of the July 2026 launch of the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam, hoping to ease bar candidates’ minds and keep test days free from tech-induced drama.
With the planned sunsetting of the in-person, live-proctored Uniform Bar Exam, the use of paper and pencil for the multiple-choice portion of the most-used bar exam will go too. Instead, the new NextGen UBE will be entirely conducted via the examinees’ personal computers at approved locations.
The NCBE has been working on the delivery elements for the NextGen UBE since 2020, and it started user testing in 2021, says Sophie Martin, the NCBE communications director. This stands in contrast to California’s flubbed February bar exam, which launched in remote and hybrid options just months after committing to go digital.
“The way that the National Conference of Bar Examiners is rolling out the NextGen is very prudent,” says Dean Barbieri, the former director for examinations for the State Bar of California. “They’re not rushing it. They are testing and reviewing the pretest results and reviewing the administration results.”
That doesn’t mean the NCBE doesn’t face substantial hurdles, says Susan Henricks, former executive director of the Texas Board of Law Examiners. “The challenge for them is maintaining the integrity of the exam, the confidentiality of it—because the questions on the multiple-choice part are reused. It’s a highly refined instrument with a lot of data behind it that’s really valuable.”
To date, 45 jurisdictions have committed to using the NextGen UBE.
Unlike the current exam, which has a specific section for essay questions, the NextGen UBE will be administered in three, three-hour sessions, each offering multiple choice, essay and performance tests, says Kara Smith, the chief product officer at the NCBE.
Currently, official NCBE standards requires all portions of the UBE to be conducted with paper and pencil, and answers to the Multistate Bar Exam multiple-choice portion are submitted on Scantron forms, Martin says. But jurisdictions can opt to use a secure software, such as ExamSoft, ILG Exam360 or Extegrity Exam 4, to handle the Multistate Essay Exam and Multistate Performance Exam portions, she adds.
Though the entire NextGen UBE will be delivered via computer, the NCBE is standing firm in its policy to not conduct its exams remotely.
The NCBE tried that during the pandemic, allowing jurisdictions to conduct remote exams using ExamSoft. Complaints of crashes and faulty facial recognition followed the tests 2020 and 2021, and the NCBE reinstated its rules against remote exams.
For the NextGen UBE, the NCBE changed providers, moving from ExamSoft to Internet Testing Systems, which will “provide secure and scalable technology to deliver and enable grading,” according to an ITS release.
ITS delivers other high-stake tests, including the GMAT, Iowa Assessments and the Test of English as a Foreign Language delivered globally to many hundreds of thousands of candidates, according to a document supplied by the NCBE.
Still, the stakes are high as the bar exam moves from paper booklets.
“You need to have every single person with a solid connection at the time you start the exam,” says Greg Sarab, the founder and CEO of Extegrity, a testing software provider. “If the network goes down, those people won’t be taking the bar exam because other people will know the questions—and they can’t take it tomorrow.”
While the revamped bar exam will have a different format and questions, as far as tech goes, Sarab says, “I would keep it dull. I wouldn’t try to do anything fancy.”
To prepare for next year’s rollout, the NCBE is running two pilots in 2025 —one took place in April, the other is scheduled for August — each with 120 candidates testing the mock exam, Smith says.
Then, in January 2026, a 1,500-person beta test will be administered across four jurisdictions, allowing time for additional tweaks before the July 2026 launch, Smith adds. More than 286 law schools in 51 U.S. jurisdictions and in total of 32 countries have participated in pre-testing the NextGen exam, according to the NCBE.
A series of earlier pilot, field and prototype testing found that some items appeared differently on Macs or PCs, Smith adds. After making adjustments, “all candidates experience the exact same rendering of a question, regardless of their device, regardless of the size of their screen,” she says.
Also, the NCBE also learned that some test-takers’ anxiety ramps up as they watch a timer counting down during testing, so the timer feature was adjusted to allow candidates to toggle it on and off, she adds.
A full exam tutorial and the mock exam will be available publicly by late summer, allowing candidates time to practice, says Marilyn Wellington, the NCBE chief strategy and operations officer, and taking the mock exam is mandatory before taking the actual NextGen UBE, ensuring candidates that their computer meets the necessary specifications.
Test days, NCBE officials say, will work like this: Candidates will arrive at NCBE-approved locations around the country, equipped with secure Wi-Fi and backup internet hot spots.
Then, examinees will use passwords specific to the room where they are taking the test to access Wi-Fi in a single sign-on system, Smith says, and that will prompt the first three hours of content to stream in an encrypted fashion onto their devices. “It’ll probably be instantaneous but could take up to 13 seconds,” she adds.
Two types of proctors will monitor each room. One set, hired by the jurisdictions, conducts standard proctoring, such as maintaining security of the exam and supporting candidates. The others, after receiving extensive training to handle tech issues, will be hired by the NCBE and ITS, Wellington says.
“If a device has a malfunction, they’ll have really deep knowledge on how to support those candidates in person,” Smith says. And if the Wi-Fi crashes mid-test, “we’ll fire up some hot spots,” she adds.
To prevent issues uploading answers simultaneously, ease concerns of unreliable Wi-Fi and ensure the security of test questions, the testing platform has caching capabilities that continuously uploads the answers, Smith says. Despite being connected to Wi-Fi, the candidates won’t be able to access files, browsers or AI tools.
“Their answers will never actually stay on their device,” she adds. “Their answers are immediately uploaded to the cloud along with the question content.”
When a three-hour section concludes, test-takers will no longer be able to review their answers or the questions, as the platform stores the information in the cloud and removes the content from their devices, she says.
Downloading questions and uploading the answers are the major potential pain points, Smith says.
“We have tested the ITS system to the load of 90,000 simultaneous downloads,” Smith adds. “We want all candidates to begin the exam at the exact same time, we want to ensure security.” In July 2024, as many as 50,176 examinees have taken the bar exam in the U.S. at one time, according to the NCBE—the largest number to have taken the test at a single administration.
The ITS release announcing the partnership with the NCBE states its testing platform will be involved with grading.
“That’s a wrinkle that was new to me,” says Greg Bordelon, assistant professor of legal studies at Suffolk University, and former executive director of the Louisiana Committee on Bar Admissions.
All responses—both multiple-choice and written—will be submitted through the centralized ITS platform, where it will be graded. Just like the current system, jurisdictions will hire graders to handle the written responses while NCBE graders will score the multiple-choice questions. The NCBE will offer more robust training for graders to guarantee consistency, officials say.
Once those scores and grades are produced, NCBE psychometricians will use the NCBE’s own systems to calculate final results for all examinees, NCBE officials add.
The centralized system allows a new level of quality control, “because we can monitor if there’s a grader who is floating in their grading over time,” Smith adds.
Though artificial intelligence will not be used for grading at this time, the NCBE is researching whether it can be used to support human-conducted grading in the future, Smith says. “We feel strongly that AI will never replace humans in our development process.”
While the launch of a new high-stakes test can cause anxiety for everyone from the test developers to law faculty to examinees, the goal of the NCBE’s pretesting is to decrease the candidates’ stress on exam day,” Smith says.
“It’s critically important that the technology not get in the way of candidates being able to demonstrate their proficiency,” she says, “but rather that the technology enhances how candidates can demonstrate their proficiency.”
