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Important Updates

Accessing Practice Materials
We’ve introduced a suite of new resources and a daily support tool called AP Classroom for teachers and students to use throughout the year. Designed and tested in collaboration with AP teachers, these resources include unit guides that cover the content and skills assessed on the exam, personal progress checks, and a dashboard to highlight strengths and opportunities for growth.

Learn more about the new resources

Preparing Students for the Exam
Create personalized practice with a library of multiple-choice and free-response AP questions you can assign to students online or on paper using the question bank in AP Classroom.

Sign In to AP Classroom

2019 Score Reports Now Available
Access 2019 AP score reports.

Go to AP Score Reports for Educators

Exam Overview

Exam questions assess the course concepts and skills outlined in the course framework. For more information on exam weighting, download the AP Human Geography Course and Exam Description (CED). Scoring guidelines for each of the sample free-response questions in the CED are also available.

Encourage your students to visit the AP Human Geography student page for exam information and exam practice.

  • Event
    • Tue, May 5, 2020

    AP Human Geography Exam Day

    • Noon | 2 hrs

Exam Format

Starting in the 2019-20 school year, the AP Human Geography Exam will have question types and point values that will remain stable from year to year, so you and your students know what to expect on exam day.

Exam Updates
2019 Exam Starting with the 2020 Exam

Section I: Multiple Choice

75 Questions | 1 Hour | 50% of Exam Score

  • The specific types of questions vary from exam to exam.

Section I: Multiple Choice

60 Questions | 1 Hour | 50% of Exam Score

There will now be increased emphasis on analyzing quantitative and qualitative sources in both individual and set-based multiple-choice questions:

  • 5–8 sets will each include 2–3 questions with a quantitative or qualitative source.
  • At least 1 of these sets will include a paired set of sources.

 

Section II: Free Response

3 Questions | 1 Hour 15 Minutes | 50% of Exam Score

  • Question types vary from year to year, and may ask students to:
    • Synthesize different topical areas
    • Analyze and evaluate geographical concepts
    • Supply appropriately selected and well-explained real-world examples to illustrate geographic concepts
    • Interpret verbal descriptions, maps, graphs, photographs, and/or diagrams
    • Formulate responses in narrative form
  • Each free-response question is worth 5–8 points.

Section II: Free Response

3 Questions | 1 Hour 15 Minutes | 50% of Exam Score

  • Task and stimulus types will stay consistent from year to year, with the following focus for each of the three questions:
    1. Describe, explain, apply geographic situation or scenario (no stimulus)
    2. Describe, explain, apply geographic data using data, image, or map (one quantitative or qualitative source)
    3. Describe, explain, apply geographic data using data, image, and/or map (two sources, qualitative and/or quantitative)
  • Each free-response question will now be worth 7 points.

Exam Tasks and Content

Section 1: Multiple Choice

  • Individual questions.
  • Set-based questions.
  • Approximately 30%–40% of the multiple-choice questions will reference stimulus material, including maps, tables, charts, graphs, images, infographics, and/or landscapes, roughly evenly divided between quantitative and qualitative sources.

Section 2: Free Response

  • Each free-response question presents students with an authentic geographic situation or scenario and assesses students’ ability to describe, explain, and apply geographic concepts, processes, or models, as they analyze geographic patterns, relationships, and outcomes in applied contexts.
    • Question 1 does not include any stimuli.
    • Question 2 includes 1 stimulus (data, image, or map).
    • Question 3 includes 2 stimuli (data, images, and/or maps).
  • At least 2 of the 3 free-response questions assess students’ ability to analyze across geographic scales to explain spatial relationships.

Exam Questions and Scoring Information

For free-response questions (FRQs) from the 2019 exam, along with scoring information, check out the table below.

Be sure to review the Chief Reader Report (available this fall). In this invaluable resource, the chief reader of the AP Exam compiles feedback from members of the AP Reading leadership to explain how students performed on the FRQs, summarize typical student errors, and address specific concepts and content with which students have struggled the most that year.

2019: Free-Response Questions
Questions Scoring Samples and Commentary Score Distributions

Free-Response Questions - Set 1

 

Free-Response Questions - Set 2 

Scoring Guidelines - Set 1

 

 

Scoring Guidelines - Set 2

Coming Soon

Coming Soon

Exam Practice

Score Reporting

Policies