Bar exam questions, bar exam practice tests and a bar exam prep course for the NextGen UBE

This is the first question to settle, and it has nothing to do with your prep and everything to do with your jurisdiction. The NextGen UBE debuted on July 28 and 29, 2026 in ten jurisdictions: Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon and Washington, plus Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and the Virgin Islands. A larger group joins in July 2027, more in February and July 2028. NCBE has confirmed the legacy exam stays available through the February 2028 administration. Two practical rules follow. If you are graduating in spring 2028 or later, you are almost certainly taking NextGen. If you are sitting before then, check your own jurisdiction, because a neighboring state's answer will not be yours.

• First NextGen administration: July 28 and 29, 2026, in ten jurisdictions
• Legacy UBE (MBE, MEE, MPT) remains available through February 2028
• California has never used the UBE and runs its own California Bar Examination
• Check NCBE's jurisdiction table for your state, since dates have moved before

The structure is a real departure, not a rebrand. NextGen is 9 hours across three 3-hour sections over a day and a half, down from the legacy exam's 12 hours over two days. The MBE, MEE and MPT no longer exist as separate components. Each section instead mixes roughly 40 standalone multiple-choice questions, two integrated question sets and one performance task. Essays as a freestanding component are gone, absorbed into the integrated sets, and performance tasks grow from two to three and now carry 30% of your score.

• Three 3-hour sections over 1.5 days, 9 hours total
• 120 standalone multiple-choice questions, of which 100 are scored
• Six integrated question sets (one is unscored) and three performance tasks
• Weighting: multiple choice 49%, performance tasks 30%, integrated sets 21%

NextGen tests eight Foundational Concepts through February 2028: business associations, civil procedure, constitutional law, contract law, criminal law, evidence, real property and torts. Family law joins as a ninth in July 2028. Conflict of laws and secured transactions, both on the legacy essay list, do not appear at all. Family law and trusts and estates are the subtlety most summaries get wrong: they are not cut. Through February 2028 they appear on every exam inside skills-focused questions, with the legal resources supplied, and NCBE states examinees "are not expected or required to develop a base of knowledge in those areas." Reading them and outlining them are very different amounts of work.

• Eight Foundational Concepts through February 2028, nine from July 2028
• Conflict of laws and secured transactions are not tested
• Family law and trusts and estates appear as skills context, with resources given
• Seven Foundational Skills, including legal research, writing, and client counseling

This is the trap that will catch the most people. Legacy UBE scores are reported on a 400-point scale, where jurisdictions set passing scores between 260 and 270. NextGen scores are reported on a 500 to 750 scale, and the two are not comparable. A number that means one thing on one exam means nothing on the other. Announced NextGen cut scores so far cluster from 610 to 620. If you see a prep page telling you that UBE cut scores run to 280, close it: no jurisdiction is above 270, and that error is a reliable signal the rest of the page is stale too.

• Legacy UBE: 400-point scale, cut scores from 260 to 270
• NextGen UBE: 500 to 750 scale, announced cut scores so far 610 to 620
• Legacy weighting was MBE 50%, MEE 30%, MPT 20%
• NextGen written answers are graded against uniform NCBE rubrics, not ranked against other examinees

The overlap between the two exams is larger than the noise suggests. Seven of the eight NextGen Foundational Concepts are the seven legacy MBE subjects, and multiple choice is still the single largest scored component on both. So the core work does not change: answer a very large number of questions, then spend longer reviewing them than you spent answering. The bar rewards recognizing which rule is in play, and that recognition only comes from seeing the same rule tested from twelve different angles. What changes is the periphery, meaning the skills questions and the performance tasks, and those reward practice under a clock rather than memorization.

• Drill the seven MBE subjects; they carry over almost entirely
• Review each missed question until you can name the rule you misapplied
• Practice performance tasks timed, since they are 30% of a NextGen score
• Do not buy a course that cannot tell you which exam it was written for