This article originally appeared in The Bar Examiner print edition, Spring 2025 (Vol. 94, No. 1), pp. 1–2.
By Darin B. Scheer
Greetings, friends and colleagues in the bar admissions community. The candidates who will take the Uniform Bar Examination in July, and those who may take the NextGen exam in the coming years, are currently on my mind. As a member of the Wyoming Board of Law Examiners, I get to meet with students at the University of Wyoming College of Law to answer their questions about the bar exam. If I could have a similar conversation with all bar exam candidates directly, this is what I would say:
Dear bar exam candidates,
I am writing to discuss the bar exam in your future and, hopefully, to put your mind at ease about how that exam is created and what it seeks to achieve. For those of you who have successfully completed law school, congratulations. I know it was not easy—nothing worth doing ever is. For those still in law school, I offer my encouragement and an assurance that once you finish, a fair bar exam will allow you to demonstrate your competence.
I took bar exams in two different jurisdictions more than 20 years ago (sadly, there was no UBE score portability back then). I gave very little thought to how the test questions (commonly referred to as test items within the testing profession) had been drafted, much less whether they were methodologically valid and statistically reliable. Nor did I contemplate the larger purpose of the bar exam itself: protecting the public and the legal profession by requiring applicants to demonstrate minimum competence before they become licensed to practice law. I just wanted to pass.
After grading bar exams for more than a decade and volunteering with the National Conference of Bar Examiners since 2017, I now have a different perspective. I certainly still relate to the desire to pass the exam; I hope all applicants who can demonstrate minimum competence to practice law are able to do so. But I also have a much deeper appreciation for the extraordinary efforts undertaken to ensure every applicant has a fair chance to demonstrate their competence via a valid and reliable exam.
The bar exam is not a black box, inaccessible and purposefully anxiety-inducing to those who take it. To the contrary, bar examiners and bar admissions professionals want every candidate to have their best testing experience in terms of demonstrating mastery of entry-level legal knowledge and practical skills, and they work hard to that end. How is this accomplished?
Committees of prominent law professors, deans, judges, and practicing attorneys from across the nation draft and review UBE test items. Each item undergoes a rigorous multiyear review process. All items undergo a rigorous pretesting process before they ever appear on the bar exam. Multiple-choice items are subjected to a detailed statistical analysis, which ensures they perform in a valid and reliable way. This means that, in a statistically demonstrable fashion, each item results in a meaningful distinction between applicants who are minimally competent as measured across the whole exam form and those who are not. Methodologically, the UBE has consistently demonstrated statistical reliability that equals or exceeds the results achieved by other high-stakes licensing exams for professionals, including doctors, certified public accountants, nurses, and pilots. NCBE’s highly experienced psychometricians then ensure consistency over time by the statistical practice of equating scores—a procedure that adjusts examinees’ scores to compensate for variations in exam difficulty. By employing this best practice for high-stakes testing, NCBE can confirm that applicant scores from each UBE administration can be compared with, and are the equivalent of, scores resulting from other UBE administrations. As a result, UBE applicants get the benefit of score portability: they can transfer scores to gain bar admission in other jurisdictions within the UBE compact.
NextGen test items will undergo a similar process, and the NextGen exam itself is the result of many years of hard work and valuable input from across the nation. In 2018, NCBE commissioned a comprehensive three-year study of the bar exam. After conducting listening sessions with hundreds of stakeholders from bar admission agencies, jurisdictions’ highest courts, the legal academy, and law firms, NCBE’s Testing Task Force then performed a nationwide practice analysis involving nearly 15,000 lawyers who provided data on the work newly licensed lawyers do and the knowledge and skill required for early-career competence. Based on those results, the Testing Task Force made three overarching recommendations for developing the bar exam of the future.
- The breadth of knowledge the exam tests should be narrowed to include only those areas that cross a wide range of practice areas—from litigation to transactional work—that newly licensed lawyers most commonly encounter.
- The depth of knowledge assessed should be adjusted to more closely reflect the actual practice of law and the level of familiarity needed for competent practice by a newly licensed lawyer.
- An integrated exam structure should be used to assess legal knowledge and skills holistically, in a single practice-related examination.
After meeting with recent graduates who took a NextGen pilot test this past fall, many of whom had taken the UBE a few months before, I’m happy to report that the feedback was highly positive. Many candidates said the NextGen questions felt more relevant to the actual practice of law, and they praised the way that they were asked to analyze the provided materials in order to arrive at their answer. I also recently completed external review of some new proposed NextGen items with a law school dean who had similar comments.
I hope this information helps put your mind at ease about how the bar exam is created, the goals it seeks to achieve, and how much hard work has gone into creating a fair test for you to demonstrate your competence. On behalf of bar admissions professionals nationwide, we will be rooting for you to have your best testing experience on exam day.
Kindest regards,
Darin B. Scheer
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