Is This A Key Moment For The Bar Exam?

ABA Journal, Is This a Key Moment for the Bar Exam?:

California is xreating its own bar exam. The ABA approved additional pathways to licensure. States are lowering bar pass cut scores. And the NextGen Bar exam launches in 2026.

The typically slow-moving wheels of bar exam reform have sped up in the past few months, creating a pileup of changes that some experts say makes this a key moment for the venerated-yet-dreaded licensing exam. ...

The bar exam is an easy target. “Nobody likes it,” says Kellye Testy, executive director and CEO of the Association of American Law Schools. “It really hasn’t shown that it had a strong correlation to success in practice.”

Previously, despite consistent grumblings about the bar exam since its first iteration by the National Conference of Bar Examiners 52 years ago, there was no appetite for reforming the licensing process, says Joan Howarth, emerita professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law and the author of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing. “I’m not sure that people even talked about reform much.”

Now, various jurisdictions are considering different plans to course-correct, with a potential domino effect of consequences among the states.

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