This article originally appeared in The Bar Examiner print edition, Winter 2025-2026 (Vol. 94, No. 4), pp. 1–3.
By Darin B. ScheerA Collaborative Effort: How the CBAA Is Helping Shape the NextGen UBE
Greetings, friends and colleagues in the bar admissions community. As I’ve discussed in previous columns, when it comes to the NextGen UBE, those of us at NCBE—staff and volunteers alike—take enormous ownership in getting it right. But we are not alone in this endeavor. At the Council of Bar Admission Administrators Fall Meeting in San Antonio (see article for a brief writeup on the meeting), administrators from across the country demonstrated, yet again, their commitment to making the new exam a success. This collaboration continued with the active participation of numerous CBAA members at the January 8–10 NextGen Beta administration.
Bar administrators play a critical role in the legal licensure process. Drawing upon many collective decades of experience with candidates, proctors, courts, and jurisdictional processes, their insights and input have been essential for developing the NextGen UBE. Through their contributions, we are ensuring that policies, platforms, and procedures align with the realities of exam administration and bar licensure. Simply stated, we could not have gotten here without their ongoing collaborative efforts.
CBAA members have always played an important role with NCBE. Several have served on the NCBE Board of Trustees, including current members John McAlary from New York and Lisa Perlen from Tennessee. Every year, the CBAA chair also serves as an ex officio member of the board. In addition to volunteering on the Board of Trustees, CBAA members have a robust presence on NCBE policy committees, and the two organizations regularly collaborate on educational programming for bar admissions professionals.
For NextGen UBE development, implementation, and administration, ongoing CBAA guidance and iterative feedback have been especially influential in three central areas: (1) shaping the design of the digital delivery platform; (2) offering valuable insights regarding the practicalities of exam administration; and (3) helping build and refine the new candidate and jurisdiction portals. Although brief, the following overview provides a sense of the detailed work and collaboration taking place to optimize the new portals and delivery platform.
Designing a Delivery Platform Grounded in Real Administration
After administering the 2024 NextGen prototype exam, CBAA members offered insights about how to improve the delivery platform to better reflect the operational realities of exam day. That guidance helped inform NCBE’s adoption of the Internet Testing Systems delivery system and played an important role in determining which features it should have and how those should function. CBAA input led to the development of new platform capabilities that had not originally been envisioned: a privacy screen that automatically activates after twenty minutes of inactivity; a built-in stop-the-clock function that tracks test taker break time internally rather than requiring administrators to monitor room clocks; and a time-locked instruction sequence that will ensure all examinees begin testing at the same time. CBAA members’ feedback also resulted in improved navigation to match the exam’s structure and a redesigned confirmation screen to help proctors easily verify that data was securely uploaded. Of equal importance, CBAA members helped identify (and advised the removal of) features that could undermine exam oversight, from redundant administrative steps to in-exam privacy screens that obscured examinees’ content from their neighbors but also made it difficult for proctors to monitor security. Through this collaborative process, the delivery platform evolved to better align with the needs of exam security, fairness, and real-world administration.
Strengthening Administration Architecture Through Policy
CBAA members played an important role in shaping the NextGen UBE Conditions of Use, which establish the policies governing the new exam’s administration. Members helped refine decision points such as how and when an examinee may be permitted to sit and how those policies should be communicated to candidates to ensure clarity, consistency, and fairness across jurisdictions.
Bar administrators emphasized the importance of synchronized launch procedures to help guarantee that all examinees start and finish testing at the same time, which reduces disruptions and contributes to exam security. They also provided useful feedback that led to the inclusion of three built-in stop-the-clock break durations; this supports accessibility and simplifies administrative processes.
In these and other instances, the CBAA helped bridge the gap between policy intent, test security, and operational reality. Their collaboration with NCBE has helped ensure that the rules governing the NextGen UBE are not only enforceable but also practicable and supportive of access, fairness, and consistency.
Building a Digital Ecosystem That Supports Candidates and Jurisdictions
The CBAA collaboration also contributed to development of the candidate and jurisdiction portals. In the jurisdiction portal, member input informed the design of the eligibility-to-sit roster, clarified which candidate information should be editable (and under what conditions), and helped shape tools for visualizing exam-day progress—even across multiple testing sites. These insights helped build a system that is accurate and responsive to the ways jurisdictions manage examinee groups in real time.
As for the candidate portal, CBAA members emphasized that, although candidates interact directly with NCBE systems, jurisdictions should remain their primary point of contact. This resulted in important discussions about which information should be displayed in the portal and which should be managed by the jurisdictions themselves. CBAA feedback also helped improve the clarity and tone of language used throughout the system, ensuring that candidates will understand and trust instructions and content. It also helped shape new features designed to support score portability and transparency. For instance, candidates registered in multiple jurisdictions are required to designate one jurisdiction for administration. The portal can also produce score reports to indicate the total number of bar exam attempts across jurisdictions. These contributions helped evolve the portals into useful tools that reflect the responsibility jurisdictions hold for data accuracy, candidate accountability, and public protection.
Engagement, Insight, and a Continued Partnership
The collaboration between NCBE and the CBAA has involved both formal and informal channels. Early in the NextGen UBE development process, NCBE’s User Experience Division conducted interviews and focus groups to better understand jurisdiction processes. Administrators participated through surveys, webinars, sandbox testing, and meetings. Demonstration stations at CBAA gatherings allowed administrators to interact directly with evolving systems and provide in-context feedback. While these structured sessions were certainly informative, some of the most influential insights emerged from unplanned moments such as follow-up conversations, informal exchanges, and ongoing dialogue rooted in our organizations’ shared purpose.
In early January, NCBE conducted a Beta administration of the NextGen exam to roughly 1,500 candidates who sat for the July 2025 bar exam. The Beta exam tested all the systems, portals, and procedures described in this column, in conjunction with administrators from 35 jurisdictions who attended Beta sites across four jurisdictions to observe and help. The success of the Beta administration was a testament to community building and the hard work of the NCBE staff and administrators who participated, giving an exciting preview of what lies ahead.
A System Built Together
The strength of the NextGen UBE lies in both what it assesses and how it is administered. This requires mutual trust between those responsible for its implementation and those who will carry out the actual administration. CBAA members have been co-architects of an ecosystem designed to serve candidates, protect the public, and maintain confidence in the legal profession. Their insight has helped bridge the gap between policy and practice, and between design and delivery. They have achieved this by evolving the exam and portal designs to better reflect jurisdictional realities, elevating the candidate experience, and aligning with the practical, policy, and security implications of real-world administration.
On behalf of the NCBE Board of Trustees, we are incredibly grateful for—and committed to continuing—this partnership through the NextGen UBE July 2026 launch and beyond.
Kindest regards,
Darin B. Scheer
Contact us to request a pdf file of the original article as it appeared in the print edition.
