Steven Foster (Oklahoma City) & Nachman N. Gutowski (UNLV; Google Scholar), Breaking the Cycle: Rethinking Bar Exam Scoring and Portability for NextGen Examinees, 2024 U. N. Tex. Dall. L. Rev. __ :

The development of the NextGen Bar Exam presents a crucial opportunity to address longstanding challenges in both bar exam scoring and portability concerns. The reliance on recent graduates' performance on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) as a baseline for setting future standards is flawed due to relative scoring and scaling. In addition to concerns regarding how the future bar exam is scored, there are also concerns regarding how the new scoring metric on the NextGen bar exam will be used for portability and, more specifically, what will happen between 2026 and 2028 as the NextGen bar exam is progressively adopted by jurisdictions. 

This paper argues for a shift from score-based models to a standards-based, rubric-driven assessment that would better reflect minimum competence. This paper also advocates for one national score to qualify for legal practice to realize true score portability between jurisdictions finally.

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