Keeping Up to Data: November 2025

Welcome to Keeping Up to Data^SM, a space in which we discuss, analyze, and contextualize trends and perspectives in the current law school admission cycle.

SUSAN KRINSKY: Welcome back to Keeping Up to Data. I’m Susan Krinsky, executive vice president for operations at LSAC^®, with an update on the 2026 application cycle, and a very interesting talk with Susannah Pollvogt, principal consultant for academics and curriculum with LSAC’s Legal Education Consulting team. Susannah’s going to talk with us about the NextGen Bar Exam.

Well, here we are, about two and a half months into the 2026 application cycle, which started with a bang. About five weeks ago, applicant volume was up 37% over last year, but you’ll recall my cautions about not assuming that those early year-over-year increases would remain at those levels. And, as we expected, the increase in 2026 applicants has now moderated to a still-impressive 24.6% over 2025 applicants. But, again, it’s very early in the application cycle. At this time last year, we had only 27% of the final applicant count and only 24% of the final application count, so we are making no predictions about the final numbers, which are many months away.

As of this week, 44% of individuals who have submitted at least one application for 2026 admission identify as persons of color. 55% identify as female, 42% as male, 2% did not indicate a gender, and just under 1% identify as gender diverse. 24.9% of applicants describe themselves as being first-generation college attendees or graduates. Applicants from all regions of the U.S. are up, with applicants from the Mountain West (that’s Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico) and Northwest (that’s Oregon, Washington, and Alaska) are up well over 40%. Canadian applicants are up 22.3% percent over last year, and applications to Canadian law schools are up 22.1%. Applications to U.S. member schools are currently up 21.2% over last year and up nearly 40% when compared to the average number of applications over the past four years.

Test takers for the first three LSAT^® administrations of this cycle (August, September, and October) were up 20.8% over the first three test administrations in 2024. First-time test takers were up 12.9%. The November test administration is ongoing as I record this podcast, but it looks like there will be close to 35,000 test takers — the largest number for a single test administration since 2018, when we were only offering the test four times a year. The next LSAT administration will take place in January, and the registration deadline is November 28. As of today, registrations for that test are very close to where they were last year at this time. Attendance at LSAC’s Law School Forums has been robust and, overall, comparable to last year. So, so far, it looks like another year of significant interest in attending law school. As you know, you can keep on top of these numbers by going to our website, LSAC.org, and you’ll find a link on the homepage to the latest volume data, which is updated every night.

One of the biggest changes coming to the world of legal education is the NextGen Bar Exam, which will be administered for the first time in July of 2026 in Missouri, Maryland, and Oregon, among other jurisdictions. NextGen has been heralded as a sea change in licensing regimes, but how different is it, really, from its predecessor, the Uniform Bar Exam (or UBE)? How are schools responding to this new approach, and how should they respond? We know that bar passage rates are very important to law schools, primarily because schools want their students to succeed and be able to practice law, but also because bar passage rates play a substantial role in accreditation and law school rankings. For this reason, understanding the ins and outs of the new exam is critical.

Joining me today is Susannah Pollvogt, principal consultant for academics and curriculum with LSAC’s Legal Education Consulting team. Susannah has spent the better part of the last year not only getting acquainted with NextGen, but also helping schools pivot their approaches to teaching, assessment, and the law school curriculum. Susannah, welcome to the Keeping Up to Data podcast.

SUSANNAH POLLVOGT: Hi, Susan. It’s great to be here.

SUSAN: This is a lot to unpack. On its surface, this change sounds pretty complex. Can you walk us through the most significant changes between NextGen and the legacy Uniform Bar Exam? In other words, could you give us some more background on why these changes are coming and what schools and graduates will face starting next summer?

SUSANNAH: Absolutely. In terms of the “why,” the National Conference of Bar Examiners (or NCBE) had two main goals in mind with the NextGen Bar Exam. First, they wanted to reduce the amount of memorization that graduates had to undertake, and second, they wanted the exam to better reflect lawyering skills that attorneys actually use in practice. The first thing that NCBE did was to streamline the subject matter tested. It eliminated subjects like secure transactions and family law, but then, later on, practitioners and state supreme courts felt that it was very important to test family law, and so, that was added back into the subjects that will be tested on NextGen.

There is in the subject matter outlines a difference between so-called “starred” and “unstarred” topics. This is another effort to reduce detailed memorization. The starred topics in any given subject are topics that students must memorize in detail and rely solely on recalled knowledge on the day of the exam, but the unstarred topics, graduates only need to know on an issue-spotting level. And then finally, probably the biggest change with NextGen is that there’re new skills being tested. So for example, fact development, client counseling and legal research.

SUSAN: How does this affect law schools in terms of preparing their students for bar passage?

SUSANNAH: It really affects law schools in a lot of different ways. First of all, law professors will want to become familiar with the new content scope outlines, because some topics have been eliminated from those content scope outlines. For example, the rule against perpetuities will no longer be tested on NextGen — much to everyone’s relief, I believe. They also will want to pay close attention to which topics are starred, and deserving of more in-depth treatment, and which topics are unstarred. In general, law schools need to take a long, hard look at skills instruction across the curriculum. Way back in 1992, the MacCrate Report came out and emphasized that law schools were doing a good job of teaching substantive law, but not a great job of teaching lawyering skills and also the aspects of the profession that go to ethics and professional identity. We need to really take stock of what’s going on in terms of skills instruction.

But the biggest change, in my mind, is that now, 60% of the bar exam will have graduates looking at primary sources of fact and primary sources of law in answering questions. And this is just not how law school exams are typically designed. Law school exams are typically designed with a fact pattern that is given in the abstract, and then the students rely on memorized law in order to answer the question posed about the fact pattern. I think that one thing that you want to see law schools doing, hopefully, is adapting that exam format to better reflect NextGen, which, again, means better reflecting the realities of practice. So a professor, instead of giving a fact pattern, might provide something like a deposition transcript or interview notes, and instead of relying solely on memorized knowledge, the professor might give students a statute to look at or a judicial opinion to look at in the course of the exam.

SUSAN: Given that there are subjects that will no longer be tested, are you suggesting that law schools shouldn’t teach those subjects anymore?

SUSANNAH: That is a great question, and that is a question I get from faculty members quite often. And the short answer is no. I think that it’s important for faculty members to be familiar with the content scope outlines and to make informed and intentional choices about coverage for their classes. But you certainly don’t want faculty members feeling like the bar exam is dictating what they can and should teach, so I think it’s really about having information and making decisions based on that information.

SUSAN: You addressed this somewhat in one of your earlier responses, but could you define for me what a primary source would be?

SUSANNAH: A primary source would be the type of document that an attorney actually looks at when they are working on a case. Again, it might be a police report or an affidavit or documentary evidence, things like that. And then primary sources of law are going to be things like statutes enacted by the Legislature, maybe legislative history, certainly judicial opinions, regulations, things of that nature.

SUSAN: That makes a lot of sense, since it sounds like those are the kinds of things that an attorney in practice would actually be looking at and analyzing. How does that differ from what we might call the traditional law school exam?

SUSANNAH: The traditional law school exam, if it’s an essay exam, will provide students with something called a fact pattern. The fact pattern is basically a story. In a torts exam, it will talk about the plaintiff and the defendant and the interactions they had that might give rise to various torts. And in terms of answering that exam question, the first thing the student will do is spot the issues, right? Maybe there’s a claim for false imprisonment, or maybe there’s a claim for assault. And then the student, again, typically, with most law school exams, will rely on memorized knowledge. During the course of the semester, the students read a bunch of cases, and they extract rules of law from those cases, and then they memorize them prior to the exam so that they can apply them to the various fact patterns. There has been somewhat of a movement toward open-book exams, so a student might have their outline or their notes or even their textbook available to them, but again, typically, the student is applying a consolidated and memorized body of law.

SUSAN: One of the great resources on our website that you have provided is a series of blog postings, and in particular, on the subject of curriculum mapping, and I know that you are working directly with a number of schools on curriculum mapping. Could you tell me more about curriculum mapping? What is it, and how would it help a school?

SUSANNAH: Yeah, so, I’ve been doing a lot of curriculum mapping over this past year. It’s been a really exciting development in terms of the type of projects that I take on, and I’ve been able to help a number of schools with this to date, and the requests keep rolling in, because schools have their eye on not only the NextGen Bar Exam, but also some new requirements from the ABA in terms of accreditation standards. Schools are very eager to have assistance with curriculum mapping, because honestly, it’s a heavy lift, and folks within the school don’t necessarily have a lot of bandwidth. The faculty members are juggling responsibilities for teaching and scholarship and committee work, and it’s really not the type of thing that a single associate dean can handle on their own, so I’m able to come in and provide that extra bandwidth.

In terms of what curriculum mapping is, first of all, the “why” behind it. In legal education, we tend to be very siloed. I’m down the hall teaching my torts classes, and I have no idea what my colleague at the other end of the hall is doing in terms of constitutional law. The curriculum map gives everyone in the law school — the faculty members, the administration — a picture of the whole curriculum, and you can see how the pieces fit together or don’t fit together, and what’s being covered and what’s not being covered. The curriculum mapping process, again, is tedious in a way that I frankly love for some reason, but essentially, what you do is, you gather all the syllabi for the courses being taught at the law school, and you review those and you review them against whatever criteria are relevant to that law school.

So, right now, there’s a lot of work on: Here’s the set of skills that are tested on the NextGen Bar Exam; where is that being covered in your curriculum, as manifested in the syllabus? Here are the topics tested on NextGen; are those topics aligned with what you see in the syllabi? Also, we’re looking at learning outcomes, right? Do your syllabi articulate learning outcomes? Are those learning outcomes sufficient to meet the new ABA standards? And you essentially come up with an Excel spreadsheet, or actually several spreadsheets, where you can visualize what is going on in the curriculum in terms of what is covered, where it’s covered, when it’s covered in terms of 1L, 2L, or 3L. And typically, I provide the school with those curriculum maps, but also a narrative report explaining the findings from the curriculum map, as well as a presentation to the faculty on those findings.

SUSAN: You’ve referenced the ABA standards on learning outcomes a couple of times. This is a two-part question. First, what is a learning outcome? And second, how do these ABA accreditation standards on learning outcomes interact with preparation for the NextGen Bar?

SUSANNAH: Great, yeah. Learning outcomes, we have such experienced teachers and wise teachers in legal education, but the idea of learning outcomes, which is really prevalent in other fields and undergraduate education, just hasn’t permeated legal education to the same extent. There are a lot of people out there, in faculty and as part of the administration, who are not familiar with learning outcomes. But stated very simply, a learning outcome is just the goal for what you want your students to learn by the end of the semester or by the end of law school.

A helpful way of thinking about this is to phrase your learning outcomes as follows: A programmatic learning outcome is something a student should learn by the end of the entire program of legal education. And so, that learning outcome would be phrased, “Upon graduating from law school, students will be able to do X,” right?

And then a course-level learning outcome is simply the same principle applied at the course level. So, “Upon completion of this course, a student will be able to do Y.” And obviously, the programmatic learning outcomes are at a slightly higher level of generalization, and the course-level learning outcomes are more specific.

To get to the second part of your question, there’s a, to me, super-interesting synergy between what’s happening with NextGen preparation and what’s happening with the new ABA standards. The new ABA standards require, among other things, that every course at the law school articulate course-level learning outcomes that are specific and measurable, and that just means they have to be assessable, right? You have to be able to test or determine whether students have attained that competency in some way. And the NextGen skills dovetail really nicely with this goal. They essentially represent a blueprint for combining substantive knowledge with skills in a way that’s scalable and assessable.

For example, you might have a learning outcome that’s inspired by NextGen that would say, “By the end of this course, a student will be able to advise a client on whether a motion to dismiss on a claim of negligence per se is likely to succeed,” right? You’re combining the substantive knowledge, some procedural knowledge, as well as the important skill of advising a client.

And I stress that this does not have to be a super-heavy lift for our faculty members. I mentioned earlier that curriculum mapping is a heavy lift, but when we’re talking about learning outcomes and assessment, it’s really critical that it be simple and straightforward and sustainable, because if it’s not, the modifications to the approach to teaching and assessing simply won’t get traction. The NextGen Bar Exam can provide inspiration for these specific and measurable course-level learning outcomes that the ABA is requiring. And at the same time, then when you assess your course-level learning outcomes, you’re going to get information on whether your students are actually prepared for NextGen. So it’s really killing two birds with one stone, if you will.

SUSAN: As I understand it, the first jurisdictions to implement the NextGen Bar Exam in July of 2026 are Missouri, Maryland, and Oregon. Will all jurisdictions eventually follow this route?

SUSANNAH: Not necessarily all. We know for sure that Louisiana will not adopt NextGen, because they didn’t adopt the UBE, obviously, because they have a strong civil law tradition, and that’s certainly a big focus of the bar exam in that state. But a lot of states have adopted already. So, by the end of August, there are 45 jurisdictions that have adopted the NextGen Bar Exam. I’ll just note that that includes those states, but also U.S. territories. There were some surprises in terms of states that decided to adopt NextGen. Virginia, I actually was working with a faculty in Virginia prior to that state’s decision to adopt NextGen. They were curious to learn about NextGen, but they all, to a one, did not think that Virginia was going to adopt it, but it did. And then Florida is another jurisdiction that typically had a very strong attachment to testing state law on its exam, but they also adopted NextGen, and they’ll still have a state component.

One of the advantages of NextGen is that it’s a nine-hour exam instead of a 12-hour exam, and so, there’s an additional three hours available for states who want to focus on state-specific law. One of the most surprising things is that California is even considering adopting NextGen, and we know that California has had some difficulty with the most recent administrations of the bar exam, and so it’s understandable that they might want to work with the NCBE, given its vast experience with developing and administering bar exams.

There are a few jurisdictions, actually, in addition to Missouri, Maryland and Oregon, that are early adopters who will administer the exam in July of 2026. Then there’s a larger cohort who are shooting for the middle in terms of administering the exam in July of 2027. And then July of 2028 is the deadline; there are a bunch of jurisdictions that are adopting then. The Uniform Bar Exam is going away; it will be available through the February 2028 administration of the bar exam, but then it’s gone. So, jurisdictions that want access to the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam will have to adopt NextGen, because it won’t be available to them otherwise.

And in terms of predicting exactly how many jurisdictions will adopt, I’ll just note that there are a lot of incentives for jurisdictions to adopt. First of all, the National Conference of Bar Examiners, this is what they do. They have a team of excellent psychometricians who have a laser-like focus on making sure that the exam is valid and reliable. They’ve done that in a scalable way, which, again, is very challenging.

And to me, the most compelling incentive is that, much like the Uniform Bar Exam, the score that you get with the NextGen Bar Exam will be portable. Let’s say I take the bar exam and I score a 270 under the current scoring system. I can pursue admission in Colorado, in Kansas, in Missouri, in any jurisdiction that has a cut score of 270 or below. This is incredibly important to students, because it lowers the barriers in terms of pursuing admission to the bar in multiple jurisdictions, and it also makes it a little bit easier for them to choose to go to a law school in a state where they might not necessarily want to practice, because they can take the bar exam there, but then also transfer to another jurisdiction at a later point in time.

SUSAN: Thank you, Susannah, for joining me today. And to our listeners, I commend to you Susannah’s blog posts on the LSAC.org website. You can find them under “Law:Fully Blog.” There are posts on the NextGen Bar and also on the ABA learning outcomes standards. It may be early in the process, but I am sure we’ll be talking about NextGen over the next few years. Again, Susannah, thank you for joining us.

SUSANNAH: Thank you.

SUSAN: Thank you for joining us at Keeping Up to Data. We look forward to your joining our next episode. Until next time, stay well.

Thank you for joining us. Keeping Up to Data^SM is a production of LSAC. If you want to learn more about the current law school admission cycle and the latest trends and news, visit us at LSAC.org.

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