California Bar Votes on More Exam Research as Clock Ticks Down

California bar leaders declined to lock in a direction for the future of its bar exam, following the disastrous rollout of an attempt to recreate its test in February 2025.

Instead, they selected two options for the July 2028 bar exam for further research in a Friday vote. The bar will look into adopting the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ new NextGen exam, and it will look into administering a test using questions developed by Kaplan NA LLC, which it contracted to create material for last February’s exam.

“I am forever mindful of the February 25 bar exam,” said Chair Jose Cisneros, adding “I want to do everything possible to make sure we never, and our test takers never, have to experience that again. Which means I’m all about risk. I’m all about, what are we sure we can deliver? What are we sure is going to work? What is our highest confidence to be able to get it done?”

The NCBE test that the bar currently uses will phase out after February 2028. The bar has until this July to get approval from the state’s Supreme Court on how it should test prospective lawyers when the Multistate Bar Exam is no longer available, under a new state law requiring two-years notice to switch exam vendors.

But a number of steps need to be completed before then. The bar has to run a state law-mandated cost-benefit analysis, and the final proposal must be approved at the Board of Trustees’ meeting in May to reach the justices in time.

That time crunch is why the bar needed to decide Friday on the high-level form California’s next bar exam could take, said Chief of Admissions Donna Hershkowitz.

‘A Final Decision Not Today’

Leaders of the Board of Trustees and the Committee of Bar Examiners, still haunted by the fallout of the rushed February administration, which was marred by software crashes and revelations that a contractor used ChatGPT to write some questions, chafed under the prospective of making the weighty decision already.

California law school deans and dozens of associations of practicing lawyers presented diametrically opposed takes on the best path forward, with the deans urging adoption of the NCBE’s test and the lawyer associations pushing for a California-specific test.

At one point, Vice Chair Mark Toney proposed the state bar not run an exam in July 2028 at all, an idea that other leaders dismissed and which he admitted said “may sound like sacrilege.”

Cisneros said his choice would be to use the NextGen test in the short term as the bar continues developing a California-specific exam.

The motion the trustees ultimately adopted—changing direction from the Committee of Bar Examiners’ 8-6 vote taken minutes earlier, which was to only consider the NextGen test—was Toney’s idea.

“The point of my motion is that we make a final decision not today, but after the staff has given a little more information for us to do a comparison,” Toney said.

The Board of Trustees voted 9-2 on researching both options, but did eliminate a few other ideas for 2028. Staff won’t research administering the NextGen test with an additional California-created component tailored to Golden State lawyers, or creating a shorter test that could be administered more frequently, similar to efforts underway in Nevada.

States are rethinking how they assess lawyer competence as the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ current standardized test is set to be administered for the last time in February 2028.

Some jurisdictions see the deadline as an opportunity to address concerns that the bar doesn’t adequately measure what new attorneys need to know, are pursuing alternatives to a nationwide test.

“I think that we’re in a very weird room right now—we have a ton of attorneys that are all going to be extremely risk averse by nature,” said Committee of Bar Examiners Member Ashley Silva-Guzman. But, she said, there’s no guarantee the NCBE will get the NextGen test right.

“We can change the face of the bar as we know it, and give something that we’re proud of,” Silva-Guzman said.