Don't Just Practice the Law, Practice the Exam

One of the most overlooked aspects of bar preparation is learning how to take the exam in the format in which it will actually be administered.

Many students spend hundreds of hours learning substantive law and completing practice questions, but very little time becoming comfortable with the testing environment itself. Yet familiarity with the testing platform and testing procedures can reduce anxiety, prevent avoidable mistakes, and improve efficiency on exam day.

The specific practice you need depends on which exam you will be taking.

Legacy UBE Examinees

If you're taking the Legacy UBE, remember that all exam questions are provided in paper form. The MBE is completed using a paper question booklet and a paper answer sheet, and the essay and performance test questions are also distributed on paper. While you will type your essay and MPT responses using a testing software on your laptop, you'll still be reading and working from printed materials throughout the exam.

As you work through your commercial bar review course, vary how you complete practice questions.

Completing MBE questions online can be extremely helpful because the software tracks your performance, identifies strengths and weaknesses, and provides valuable analytics. However, you should also spend time completing questions from printed question books and using paper answer sheets.

Why?

Because exam day requires more than knowing the law. It requires accurately transferring your answers to a bubble sheet for six hours while managing fatigue and maintaining focus.

Several years ago, I administered a law school final examination using paper answer sheets to simulate the MBE experience. Despite knowing the law, some students made avoidable mechanical errors. One student selected Answer Choice "E" for a question even though the exam only provided answer choices A through D. Another student accidentally bubbled in two answers for the same question. Both responses were scored as incorrect.

These mistakes are easy to laugh about when discussing them in class, but they become much less funny when they occur on a high-stakes licensing exam.

The lesson is simple: Practice using the same tools you will use on exam day. The more familiar you are with paper answer sheets, the less likely you are to make a costly administrative error when fatigue sets in late in the afternoon.

NextGen UBE Examinees

If you're taking the NextGen UBE, your exam experience will be very different.

The NextGen UBE is administered entirely on a computer through NCBE's secure testing platform. Multiple-choice questions, Integrated Question Sets (IQS), and Performance Tasks will all be completed electronically. Examinees will be required to install NCBE's secure browser and complete a tutorial before exam day.

Because the exam is fully digital, it is important to become familiar with the testing platform long before exam day.

The NCBE provides an interactive tutorial for the NextGen UBE that allows you to explore the layout, navigation tools, question types, highlighting features, answer fields, and other functionality that will appear on the actual exam. The NCBE specifically encourages examinees to use these resources to become familiar with the testing experience.

For NextGen examinees, practicing under exam-day conditions means more than answering questions correctly. It means becoming comfortable with:

✅ Navigating between resources and questions;

✅ Using highlighting and annotation tools;

✅ Working within the constructed-response answer fields;

✅ Managing time while reading documents on screen;

✅ Understanding how multiple-select questions function;

✅ Becoming familiar with Integrated Question Sets and Performance Tasks; and

✅ Learning the overall flow of the testing platform.

I strongly encourage every NextGen examinee to spend time exploring NCBE's software preview and tutorial before beginning the final weeks of bar preparation.

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Whether you are taking the Legacy UBE or the NextGen UBE, one principle remains the same:

The closer your practice resembles the actual testing experience, the fewer surprises you will encounter on exam day. And when the bar exam arrives, surprises are the last thing you want.