What the complexity point is
Both essays end with a rubric row called analysis and reasoning, and the complexity point is the last point in it. College Board describes it the same way on the DBQ and the long essay (LEQ): the essay shows a “complex understanding” of the development the prompt is about, through a sophisticated argument, through effective use of evidence, or both. Teachers also call it the sophistication point, and the Chief Reader reports call it complex understanding. All three names mean the same point.
An essay can earn every other point by answering the question well and stopping there. The complexity point goes to an essay that also shows where the answer stops being simple, and explains why with evidence.
How it works on each essay
On the DBQ it is a separate point. You can earn it without the sourcing point beside it, and the other way around. On the LEQ the analysis and reasoning row works like a ladder: 1 point for using causation, comparison, or continuity and change to structure your argument, and 2 points for an essay that also shows complex understanding. Either way it is one point, the top one.
| Route | DBQ | LEQ |
|---|---|---|
| Explain more than one theme or perspective to show nuance | Yes | Yes |
| Explain several causes or effects, several similarities or differences, or several continuities or changes | Yes | Yes |
| Explain both halves of a reasoning process: cause and effect, similarity and difference, or continuity and change | Yes | Yes |
| Explain an insightful connection to another period or place that serves your argument | Yes | Yes |
| Use all seven documents to support your argument | Yes | No |
| Explain how the point of view, purpose, historical situation, or audience of at least four documents supports your argument | Yes | No |
| Use evidence to show a sophisticated understanding of different perspectives (on the DBQ, documents and your own evidence together) | Yes | Yes |
| Explain how at least four specific pieces of evidence support a nuanced argument | No | Yes |
How rarely students earn it
On the 2025 DBQ, 15% of essays earned complexity on one version of the exam and 16% on the other. In a class of 30, that is about five students. The same essays earned the thesis 79% and 85% of the time and the sourcing point 39% and 38%. The full row-by-row numbers are in our DBQ guide.
College Board doesn’t report complexity on its own for the LEQ, because it shares a row with the reasoning point. That row is still the weakest. On all six 2025 long-essay prompts, students earned a smaller share of the analysis and reasoning points, between 23% and 46%, than of any other row.
Readers often report essays that never try. The 2024 and 2025 Chief Readers both asked teachers to talk students out of the belief that the point is too hard to attempt. When College Board’s published sample essays miss the point, the commentary usually says the essay made no attempt at all. The attempts that do fail tend to fail in one of four ways:
- A phrase instead of an argument. A closing sentence that says there were other causes, or that some things stayed the same, is a reference, and the rubric excludes references by name.
- Vague or wrong evidence. A 2025 sample essay on U.S. foreign policy from 1890 to 1930 tried to weigh several perspectives and missed because its discussion was vague and contained historical errors.
- Perspectives named but not explained. A 2025 sample on sectional tensions set Northern and Southern views next to each other, and readers found the attempt lacked nuance.
- A connection with nothing attached. On the 2023 long essay about transatlantic trade, many students reached for the Civil War or the civil rights movement without explaining the link, and readers gave it nothing.
What changed in 2024, and why old advice misleads
A lot of the advice you will find about this point was written for the rubric College Board used through 2023. Back then, full evidence credit on the DBQ took six documents, sourcing took three, and the complexity row listed only argument routes, such as corroborating, qualifying, or modifying your argument. The rule was simply that complexity had to be part of the argument, not merely a phrase.
In 2024 College Board cut the thresholds to four documents for full evidence credit and two for sourcing, and rewrote complexity around two kinds of routes, argument and evidence. The evidence routes were new: all seven documents or four sourced on the DBQ, and four pieces of evidence behind a nuanced argument on the LEQ. So was the note that the point can appear anywhere and doesn’t have to run through the whole essay. College Board’s page on the May 2027 changes says the rubrics stay as they are.
College Board’s own note on the 2024 score changes says it altered “an advanced point that was rarely used by graders” so that it could help separate 3s, 4s, and 5s. The note doesn’t name the row. Comparing the 2023 and 2024 scoring guidelines, complexity is the row that was rebuilt.
The routes that work most often
Each Chief Reader report says how the essays that earned complexity earned it. Put the reports side by side and two routes stand out: sourcing four documents on the DBQ, and four or more specific pieces of evidence behind a nuanced argument on the LEQ. Connections to other periods are the least reliable.
| Exam | What the question asked about | What the Chief Reader reported |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 DBQ, Set 1 | The federal government and the economy, 1932–1980 | Essays qualified an argument about growing liberalism with the conservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, or sourced four documents. Those that earned the point rarely used all seven. |
| 2025 DBQ, Set 2 | Economic change and society, 1865–1910 | Several essays earned it by explaining the historical situation of at least four documents. |
| 2024 DBQ, Set 1 | Slavery and society, 1783–1840 | Most essays that earned it sourced four or more documents. Some combined documents and outside evidence across the whole period; others used all seven. |
| 2024 DBQ, Set 2 | Beliefs about threats to the nation, 1917–1945 | Many sourced the historical situation of four documents. Very few earned it with all seven. |
| 2025 LEQ | Native American adaptation, 1500–1754 | Several adaptations explained across time or place, or four pieces of evidence behind a nuanced argument. |
| 2025 LEQ | Sectional tensions, 1800–1848 | Mostly several causes, effects, or perspectives. A few carried a nuanced argument forward into the Civil War. |
| 2025 LEQ | Foreign policy, 1890–1930 | Most often several themes or perspectives across different policies; many with four or more pieces of evidence covering causes and effects; fewer through connections to the Second World War. |
| 2025 LEQ | Society and economic change, 1960–2000 | Mostly four or more specific pieces of evidence behind a nuanced argument; others through different perspectives. |
| 2024 LEQ | Social movements, 1945–1980 | The effects of several movements, or resistance to them. Comparatively few made connections to other periods that worked. |
| 2023 LEQ | Transatlantic trade, 1607–1776 | Attempted connections usually fell short. A passing reference to the Civil War or the civil rights movement earned nothing. |
| 2023 LEQ | National security, 1945–1991 | Connections often worked on this question, comparing the Cold War with the world wars, interwar isolationism, or Washington’s Farewell Address. |
Taken together, the reports suggest this order, from most reliable to least:
- On the DBQ, source four documents. It is the route the reports name most, and it can’t be faked with a phrase: four documents, each with a reason its author, purpose, audience, or moment matters to your argument. It also covers the sourcing point, which needs only two.
- On the LEQ, back a qualified claim with four or more specific pieces of evidence. Each piece has to do work in the argument. Four names in a row are a list, and a list earns nothing here.
- On either essay, give the other side its own evidence. Plan a paragraph, or most of one, for what stayed the same, what pulled the other way, or which cause mattered less and why. A single “however” sentence won’t do it.
- Connect to another period only if you can develop it. A paragraph that compares your period with another and ties the comparison back to the prompt can work. A closing line about the present almost never does.
Sample paragraphs, scored
We wrote these to show the routes at work; none is a real student’s essay. The prompts are built like real ones and come from different periods of the course. Each sample is scored on the complexity point, and on sourcing where that applies.
DBQ: sourcing four documents, 1880–1920
The prompt: “Evaluate the extent to which the federal government’s role in regulating the economy changed from 1880 to 1920.” Four of its seven documents:
- Document 1. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” an essay in the North American Review, 1889. Carnegie argues that great fortunes are natural and good for society, and that the rich should give theirs away for the public good during their own lives.
- Document 2. The platform of the People’s Party, adopted at Omaha, 1892. It demands government ownership of the railroads and the telegraph, a graduated income tax, and the free coinage of silver.
- Document 3. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906, a novel about filthy conditions and brutal work in Chicago’s meatpacking plants.
- Document 4. Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, 1910, arguing that the national government must regulate big corporations in the public interest.
Carnegie wrote as one of the richest industrialists in the country, so his argument that great fortunes served society, and that the rich should spend theirs for the public good while they lived, defended his own position (Document 1). It shows the faith in private wealth and philanthropy, instead of government regulation, that reformers had to overcome, even though Carnegie himself favored heavy taxes on large estates.
The People’s Party wrote its platform to win the votes of indebted farmers in the South and West in the 1892 election, which is why it asked the federal government to own the railroads that set their shipping rates (Document 2). Its demands went far beyond the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and they came from voters who felt both major parties had ignored them.
Sinclair, a socialist, wrote The Jungle to win sympathy for exploited packinghouse workers, but his middle-class readers fixed on the spoiled meat instead; as he later put it, he aimed at the public’s heart and hit its stomach (Document 3). The laws Congress passed in 1906, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, protected consumers and did little for workers, which shows how narrow Progressive regulation could be.
Roosevelt gave the New Nationalism speech in 1910 as a former president rallying reform Republicans against the party’s conservative wing (Document 4). His call for a national government strong enough to regulate corporations was also a bid to lead the party’s progressives, and the split became open in 1912, when he ran for president as the Progressive Party’s candidate.
How it scores
| Sourcing (1 point) | 1/1 | Two documents are enough. Each of these four explains how the author’s point of view, purpose, audience, or situation shapes what the document says. |
|---|---|---|
| Complexity (1 point) | 1/1 | The evidence route: the sourcing of at least four documents supports the argument. Each sentence ends by saying what the sourcing shows about regulation: the resistance it had to overcome, how far some voters wanted it to go, how narrow the 1906 laws were, and the political fight behind Roosevelt’s program. Naming each audience or purpose without those endings would earn neither point. |
In the essay these sentences sit in four different body paragraphs. That is what sourcing four documents usually looks like on the page: one sourcing sentence for each document you lean on, placed where the document does its work, not a sourcing paragraph at the end.
The history behind these documents is in The Rise of Industrial Capitalism (Topic 6.6), Controversies over the Role of Government in the Gilded Age (Topic 6.12), and The Progressives (Topic 7.4).
LEQ: a qualified claim with four or more pieces of evidence, 1492–1607
The prompt: “Evaluate the extent to which Spanish colonization changed Native American societies from 1492 to 1607.” First a body paragraph that earns the point, then the same history written as a list.
Spanish conquest transformed Native societies in central Mexico, but it depended on Native peoples and never fully replaced their ways of life. Hernán Cortés defeated the Aztec Empire in 1521 only with tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan and other Native allies who wanted to break Aztec rule, and with the help of a smallpox epidemic that swept Tenochtitlan in 1520. Afterward the encomienda system gave conquistadors the labor of Native villages, and forced labor on top of epidemic disease brought a population collapse so severe that Spain’s own New Laws of 1542 tried to rein the system in. The Spanish argued among themselves about what they had done: at Valladolid in 1550, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that Native peoples were rational human beings who could not justly be conquered and enslaved, while Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended the conquest. Many Native communities adapted instead of disappearing, keeping their languages and many local customs while taking up Catholic saints and festivals. The conquest overturned who ruled and who worked, but the Native communities that survived it kept much of their own language and local life.
How it scores
| Complexity (part of analysis and reasoning) | 1/1 | Two argument routes at once. It qualifies the claim (deep change, with real limits) and it explains different perspectives: Tlaxcalan allies, Las Casas and Sepúlveda, Native villages that adapted. Five specific pieces of evidence carry that argument, so it meets the four-pieces route on the way. |
|---|
Spanish colonization changed Native societies in many ways. There was the conquest of the Aztecs, the encomienda system, smallpox, the New Laws, and Las Casas. However, not everything changed.
How it scores
| Complexity (part of analysis and reasoning) | 0/1 | The evidence is named and never used, so nothing shows what any of it means. “Not everything changed” gestures at a qualification without arguing it, which is exactly the phrase the rubric rules out. This paragraph would struggle to earn the second evidence point too. |
|---|
The history in this paragraph is in Topics 1.4 and 1.5:
Topic 1.4Columbian Exchange, Spanish Exploration, and ConquestThe Wrong Size of the World
Topic 1.5Labor, Slavery, and Caste in the Spanish Colonial SystemOther People's Hands
A connection to another period that works, 1850s–1924
The prompt, for either essay: “Evaluate how Americans responded to immigration from 1865 to 1898.” Students are often told to end with a link to the present. Here is that move, and then a connection that earns the point.
Americans responded to immigration with both acceptance and hostility. Even today, Americans still argue about immigration.
How it scores
| Complexity | 0/1 | The present-day line is a reference with no argument behind it. It says nothing about the responses from 1865 to 1898, so it can’t show a complex understanding of them. |
|---|
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States, and it showed that the hostility of the 1870s could become national policy. That hostility followed a pattern older than the period. In the 1850s the Know-Nothings had organized against Irish and German Catholics, and Chinese immigrants faced the same kind of charges, that they could never become real Americans and that they drove down wages, made louder by the depression of the 1870s and by Denis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party in California. What changed after 1865 was that nativists won federal law instead of local riots and short-lived party victories. The Immigration Act of 1924 carried the same idea much further, using national-origin quotas to cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe and barring nearly all immigration from Asia. Exclusion in 1882 was a major step toward a federal immigration policy that judged newcomers by where they came from.
How it scores
| Complexity | 1/1 | An insightful connection across periods: it links the 1882 law to nativism before and after it, says what was continuous and what was new, and ties the comparison back to how Americans responded from 1865 to 1898. The 1850s and 1924 fall outside the prompt’s years, so they can’t count as evidence, but they can carry a connection like this one. |
|---|
The Gilded Age half of this is Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age (Topic 6.9); the 1924 law is in 1920s Cultural and Political Controversies (Topic 7.8).
Short pairs from other periods
In an essay each of the stronger answers below would be developed over a few sentences and tied to the thesis. On its own, each one is the start of a route.
| Route | Doesn’t earn it | Can earn it |
|---|---|---|
| Similarity and difference (1500s–1754) | “The French and the Spanish both colonized North America, but in different ways.” | “Both empires sent Catholic missionaries to convert Native peoples, but New France depended on Native partners in the fur trade and on French traders who married into Native communities, while New Spain built its colonies on forced Native labor.” |
| Qualifying a claim (1869–1900) | “Unions grew, but they also had problems.” | “The Knights of Labor grew to about 700,000 members by 1886, but after the Haymarket bombing that year newspapers and employers tied unions to anarchism, and the American Federation of Labor, which outlasted the Knights, organized mostly skilled workers and left most unskilled and immigrant laborers out.” |
| Cause and effect (1929–1941) | “The Great Depression had many causes and effects.” | “Bank failures turned the crash into a depression, as about 9,000 banks suspended operations between 1930 and 1933 and depositors lost money they could not get back. That experience is why federal deposit insurance, created in 1933, became one of the New Deal’s most lasting reforms.” |
| Different perspectives (1965–1973) | “Not all Americans supported the Vietnam War.” | “College campuses became centers of organized opposition, where students held teach-ins and Students for a Democratic Society organized marches against the war. In 1969 Nixon answered the protesters by appealing to the ‘silent majority’ of Americans who had not joined them, while many of the young men drafted to fight came from working-class families without the college deferments that protected many protesters.” |
Six myths about the complexity point
“You have to use all seven documents.”
You don’t. On the recent DBQs discussed here, readers rarely saw essays earn it that way. The 2025 Set 1 Chief Reader wrote that essays earning complexity rarely used all seven documents, and the 2024 Set 2 report saw very few do it that way. Part of this myth is left over from the rubric before 2024, when full evidence credit took six documents. If you can source four documents well, that is a complete route on its own, and seven is not required on top of it.
“It has to run through the whole essay.”
Since 2024 the scoring guidelines say the opposite: complexity can appear in any part of the essay and doesn’t have to be woven through it, as long as it is more than a phrase. The 2024 report on the long essay about settler expansion from 1754 to 1800 described essays that opened with a basic thesis and built the nuance in their last paragraph or two.
“Connect it to today in your last sentence.”
One sentence about the present is a reference, and references don’t count. What works is a connection you develop and tie back to the prompt. College Board’s top-scoring 2025 DBQ sample on the federal government and the economy, 1932 to 1980, earned complexity partly with a final paragraph comparing that debate with the arguments over federal power in the early republic. On the 2023 Cold War essay, readers credited comparisons that reached as far forward as the September 11 attacks and the war in Ukraine, when the essays explained them. Recent history is allowed; the throwaway line is the problem.
“Add a counterargument and you get it.”
Only if you argue it. A counterargument earns complexity when it has evidence of its own and changes or sharpens your answer to the prompt. A sentence that names an objection and moves on (“Some historians disagree, but…”) is a phrase.
“It’s too hard, so don’t bother.”
College Board pushes back on this one by name. Two years in a row the Chief Readers called it “the incorrect perspective that this point is too difficult to even attempt,” and they described the point as earned by going beyond a simple or basic argument. Most of the work happens in the planning minutes, when you choose a route.
“You need a sophisticated thesis.”
You don’t need one, though it helps. The thesis earns its own point, and a plain thesis with a complex body paragraph can earn complexity. But a 2025 Chief Reader suggested practicing a qualified thesis because it gives the whole essay a framework for complexity. A thesis that already says “mostly, but not for everyone” tells you which paragraph has to prove the “not.”
Plan the point before you write
Choose your route while you plan, the same way you choose your thesis. On the DBQ, that means writing a sourcing note beside at least four documents during the reading period and asking what each note does for your argument. On the LEQ, it means listing at least four specifics with their dates and finding the claim they complicate. Then, before time runs out, check the essay against these questions.
- Can I point to the sentences where the complexity is? If I can’t find it, a reader won’t either.
- Does it have evidence of its own, specific and accurate?
- Does it change or sharpen my answer to the prompt, or does it just sit next to it?
- If I connected to another period, did I explain the link and bring it back to the prompt’s years?
- On the DBQ, does each of my four sourcing sentences say why the source matters to my argument, beyond who wrote it and when?
The other rubric points have their own guides: the DBQ and the long essay. The short-answer questions have no complexity point at all.
Sources
- AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description, 2026: DBQ and LEQ rubrics, pp. 517–521, and sample scoring guidelines, pp. 538–539 and 548–549 (PDF)
- AP History Exam Updates for May 2027: rubrics unchanged (AP Central)
- 2023 AP U.S. History Scoring Guidelines, Set 1: the rubric before the 2024 change (PDF)
- 2024 AP U.S. History Scoring Guidelines, Set 1: the revised rubric (PDF)
- College Board, AP Score Changes: 2024 (PDF)
- 2025 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 1 (PDF)
- 2025 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 2 (PDF)
- 2024 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 1 (PDF)
- 2024 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 2 (PDF)
- 2023 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 1 (PDF)
- 2025 DBQ sample responses and scoring commentary, Set 1 (PDF)
- 2025 LEQ 4 sample responses and scoring commentary, Set 1 (PDF)
- 2025 LEQ 3 sample responses and scoring commentary, Set 2 (PDF)
- Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth (1889), Carnegie Corporation edition
- FDIC historical timeline: bank suspensions in 1930–1933 and the creation of deposit insurance
- The Knights of Labor: Strikes of 1885 and 1886 (National Park Service)
- Interpreting the Conquest: original sources and the New Laws of 1542 (Library of Congress)