Each year thousands of law students take an examination crucial for their admission to the legal profession. The bar exam essentially makes or breaks one’s chances of practicing law in the state. Just like each state has its own laws, nearly each state has its own take on how the bar exam should be administered and what each student should be tested on.
However, that all might be changing.
The uniform bar exam (UBE) is an examination coordinated by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), which is uniformly administered, graded, and scored by user jurisdictions and results in a portable score that can be transferred to other UBE jurisdictions. The UBE is made up of a series of tests: the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), two Multistate Performance Test (MPT) tasks, and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE).
Last month, the American Bar Association House of Delegates met to decide whether or not the legal profession should adopt the uniform bar exam.
On February 8th, the House of Delegates adopted Resolution 109, which urges bar authorities to “expeditiously” adopt the UBE, and expedite they did. One week following the passage of this resolution Vermont adopted the exam.
Vermont became the 20th state and 21st U.S. jurisdiction to adopt the UBE, which will go into effect in April. New York will also issue the state’s first form of the uniform bar exam this summer.
Despite the fact that nearly half of all the jurisdictions have adopted this specific exam, the legal profession still has its qualms. There are a wide array of viewpoints and opinions on the matter, but only time will tell what is the fate of the bar exam.