Delray Beach, Fla., June 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The bar exam no longer rewards memorization alone. Beginning July 2026, the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination scores how well you apply the law — written responses, provided resources, and the tasks lawyers actually perform.
NextGen Prep — practice-first bar prep for the NextGen UBE from JD Simplified. Practice in the shape of the real exam, and a straight answer about what to work on next.
Today, JD Simplified announced NextGen Prep — practice-first bar prep built for the NCBE NextGen UBE. The program doesn’t hand students more content: it reads each student’s own practice performance and tells them what to practice next, so they stop guessing what to study and put their hours where the points are. NextGen Prep is available now at jdsimplified.com/nextgen-prep with a 7-day free trial.
THE SHIFT
For sixty years, bar prep competed on volume: more outlines, more lectures, more hours. The NextGen UBE changes the assignment: the exam provides resources inside the test for much of the doctrine the legacy version made you memorize, and it measures whether you can use them — reading a rule, applying it to facts, writing a clear analysis under time. The NextGen era doesn’t reward more content. It rewards better direction. The exam went application-first — so prep has to go practice-first: training how you use the law, not how much of it you can hold. The question that decides a score is no longer “have I covered everything?” It is “what should I practice next?”
WHAT THE NEXTGEN UBE ACTUALLY IS
The NextGen UBE is administered as three 3-hour sections and contains three official question categories: 120 standalone multiple-choice questions (49% of scored weight), 6 Integrated Question Sets (21%), and 3 Performance Tasks (30%). Written responses earn partial credit on defined point scales. Across those formats, the exam assesses 7 Foundational Skills, organized into 4 Skill Groups, within a 28-Task framework the NCBE uses to define what each question measures.
Examinees in Connecticut, Guam, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Palau, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington — the 10 Wave 1 jurisdictions — will sit the NextGen UBE for the first time in July 2026. The legacy UBE — the MBE, MEE, and MPT — runs alongside NextGen until it is fully retired in February 2028. After February 2028, NextGen is the sole format for participating jurisdictions.
WHAT NEXTGEN PREP IS
NextGen Prep is a practice and direction layer for how you prepare for the NextGen UBE — built on a simple principle: students rarely fail for lack of material; they lose time (and exam-day points) not knowing where their preparation actually stands. So the program runs on two things. Practice in the shape of the real exam — every format, scored. And direction — after each session, a clear read on what’s reliable, what’s still building, and what hasn’t had enough practice yet. The next session doesn’t start with a question; it starts with the answer.
Sessions adapt to what each student needs. When a student misses a question, they mark why — a rule they didn’t know, facts they misread, a trap answer they fell for, a right answer they changed — and the program pairs those self-reports with what it can measure on its own, like recall-versus-application patterns, to shape what it recommends next.
The NextGen UBE reports a single blended score on a 500–750 scale; the NCBE does not publish per-skill breakdowns. NextGen Prep doesn’t pretend to predict that number. What it offers is something the score report never will: a working read on where they stand across the skills, subjects, and formats the exam tests — practice and direction built from their own work, so the next hour of study is the right one. And students already using JD Simplified in law school don’t start cold: NextGen Prep picks up the practice record they’ve already built.
WHAT STUDENTS GET
The program covers all three exam formats, modeled on how the exam presents them. Standalone multiple-choice practice spans both select-one and select-two questions. Integrated Question Sets include both Counseling Sets — mixed multiple-choice and short-answer — and Drafting Sets, which call for medium-length written responses. Performance Task practice covers both the Standard PT and the Legal Research PT, in a split-screen workbench that mirrors the digital exam environment students will see on test day.
Full-section and full-exam simulations run under realistic timing. Written responses receive automated, rubric-based scoring in seconds, with issue, rule, and analysis breakdowns that show not just what was missed but why.
The program includes 4,619+ original practice exercises — spanning all 7 Foundational Skills and all 28 Tasks — with more added over time. Each exercise passes a multi-stage quality review, including doctrinal verification and citation checks against primary legal sources, before publication.
QUOTE — JD SIMPLIFIED
“Students don’t struggle for lack of material. They struggle because their final weeks of prep go to the wrong work. The NextGen exam rewards application — and application is trainable when your practice tells you what to fix. That’s NextGen Prep: practice shaped like the real exam, a clear read on where you stand, and a straight answer about what to work on next.”
— Cris A., CEO, JD Simplified
AVAILABILITY
NextGen Prep is available today at jdsimplified.com/nextgen-prep for $499 as a one-time purchase. Students can start with a 7-day free trial that requires no credit card and does not auto-charge. The $499 purchase includes a 14-day refund policy and covers bar exam administration for the exam date the student designates. Students preparing for a later exam can choose to stay covered through that administration at the time of purchase.
ABOUT JD SIMPLIFIED
JD Simplified is a practice-first learning system for law students, from first year through the bar exam. Essay coaching, issue-spotting practice, Ask JDS — tools built for learning how to do the work. Every session builds the student’s record, so NextGen Prep — practice-first bar prep for the NextGen UBE — begins with practice based on their past performance. Built by a legal educator for students who are tired of guessing. Learn more at jdsimplified.com.
The NextGen UBE is administered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE). JD Simplified and NextGen Prep are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by NCBE.
The NextGen Uniform Bar Examination scores three official question categories by weight: standalone multiple-choice (49%), Integrated Question Sets (21%), and Performance Tasks (30%). First administered July 2026.
Press Inquiries
Cris A.
Questions@JDSimplified.com
https://jdsimplified.com
https://jdsimplified.com/nextgen-prep/
A video accompanying this announcement is available here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hWvgfh4b1yU
