AP History Exam Updates

AP history exams have been updated to provide a more consistent exam experience and give students more flexibility to demonstrate what they’ve learned throughout the course.

Below is a summary of the updates. For details, review the updated course and exam descriptions and clarifications and corrections documents at the bottom of the page.

What Changed?

All short-answer questions include source material, and the long essay question has been updated to reposition choice within the question. Both changes are designed to improve focus, transparency, and expectations for students.

Short-Answer Question (SAQ)

• Students are presented with 3 short-answer questions and are required to answer all 3 questions.
• Short-answer question 1 includes 1 or more secondary text sources, short-answer question 2 includes a primary text source, and short-answer question 3 includes a primary or secondary non-text source.
• Each question focuses on a different historical period.

Long Essay Question (LEQ)

• Students are presented with 1 long essay question and are required to answer it. 
• The long essay question includes a broad prompt from which students develop a historically defensible thesis or claim, describe the historical context relevant to the prompt, support their argument with at least 2 pieces of specific and relevant evidence, and demonstrate a complex understanding of the focus of the prompt.
• The long essay question also includes a brief introductory statement to help orient students to the task and suggest possible areas for analysis.

Document-Based Question (DBQ)

• The document-based question covers a wider chronological range, so students can use evidence from across the course.

What Stayed the Same?

• Course content and skills remain unchanged.
• The multiple-choice section remains unchanged.
• Scoring rubrics for free-response questions remain unchanged, including the criteria for how students earn points.