How to Write an APUSH LEQ: Rubric and Example

What the long essay asks

The long essay question (LEQ) asks you to argue an answer to a broad historical question from your own knowledge. There are no documents. It's worth 15% of your exam score, and College Board recommends about 40 minutes for it, inside Section II's 1 hour 40 minutes.

Starting in May 2027, there is one required prompt. It covers roughly half of the course's time periods and opens with a short statement that frames the task and suggests areas you could analyze. You may focus on one development the prompt mentions, or more than one, and you aren't expected to cover the whole span.

Every prompt calls for a kind of historical reasoning: causation (why something happened or what it led to), comparison, or continuity and change over time. The 2026 prompts asked students to “evaluate how” one development influenced another, and College Board's new sample asks students to “explain how” changes in political participation influenced society.

The 6 points and how to earn each

Readers score the LEQ out of 6 points. As on the DBQ, each point is earned on its own.

Thesis (1 point). Make a defensible claim that answers the prompt and shows a line of reasoning: a reason for the claim, or the categories you'll argue. A restated prompt earns nothing. Keep the thesis in one place, the introduction or the conclusion. It doesn't have to cover the whole time span, but it does have to name a relevant development.
Contextualization (1 point). Describe the wider history around the prompt, before, during or after its dates, that bears on the topic. A passing phrase doesn't count.
Evidence (up to 2 points). Name at least two specific examples relevant to the topic for 1 point. Use at least two specific examples to support your argument for 2 points. Evidence from outside the prompt's dates or region doesn't count, and neither does repeating what the prompt already says.
Analysis and reasoning (up to 2 points). Use historical reasoning (causation, comparison, or continuity and change) to frame or organize your argument for 1 point; it can be uneven and still count. For 2 points, show a complex understanding. College Board lists several ways: explain several causes or effects, both continuity and change, or both similarity and difference; weigh different perspectives; connect the topic to another period or place; or use at least four specific pieces of evidence to support an argument that weighs more than one side. It has to be part of the argument and more than a phrase.

Readers treat your essay as a first draft. Grammar slips don't cost points unless they hide your meaning, and a small factual error won't sink the essay as long as the history you use to make your argument is accurate.

The order to write in

Read the introductory statement and the prompt. Mark the task verb, the dates and the developments the statement names.
Choose your ground. Pick the development, and the stretch of years, you know best. One development argued well is enough.
List your evidence: specific laws, events, people, groups and dates. If you can't list at least four, choose different ground.
Decide your reasoning and your answer. Work out whether the task is about causes, change or comparison, decide what you'll argue, and write a thesis with a reason or categories.
Write a short introduction: context first, then the thesis.
Write two or three body paragraphs. Open each with a claim, give specific evidence, and explain how the evidence supports the claim.
Close with a paragraph that complicates the argument: another cause, a continuity alongside the change, another group's view, or a link to a different period.

Spending the first five minutes or so on steps 1 to 4 leaves about 35 minutes to write.

A worked example

This practice prompt follows the 2027 format: one broad question with an introductory statement. The model answer focuses on one development in one part of the span, the years before the Revolution, which the format allows.

Practice prompt

From the Seven Years' War to the end of Reconstruction, Americans repeatedly fought over who had the right to govern them and on what terms. Evaluate the extent to which disputes over political authority caused conflict in North America from 1754 to 1877. You may focus on any development or developments in this period; you are not expected to address the whole period.

Model essay

Britain won the Seven Years' War in 1763, but the victory nearly doubled its national debt. For decades London had winked at colonial smuggling, a policy historians call salutary neglect. Now Parliament set out to raise a revenue in America to help pay for defending the colonies, beginning with the Sugar Act of 1764. From 1763 to 1775, the dispute over whether Parliament could tax and govern colonists who elected no one to it was the main cause of the conflict between Britain and its colonies. Each time Parliament gave up a tax, it kept the claim of authority behind it, so the conflict grew from protests against particular taxes into a continental boycott and, in April 1775, into war.

The Stamp Act crisis shows that authority, more than cost, was at stake. The Sugar Act of 1764 actually halved the duty on molasses, but Britain now collected it, and accused smugglers faced admiralty courts with a Crown judge and no jury. The Stamp Act of 1765 then taxed newspapers, wills, licenses, college diplomas, and even playing cards and dice. Colonists answered with an argument about representation, not price. In Virginia's House of Burgesses, Patrick Henry introduced resolves calling taxation of the people by themselves or by representatives they chose “the distinguishing Characteristick of British Freedom,” and that October delegates from nine colonies, meeting as the Stamp Act Congress, declared that only the colonies' own legislatures could tax them. Merchants in New York, Philadelphia and Boston stopped ordering British goods, and Parliament repealed the tax in March 1766. On the same day, though, it passed the Declaratory Act, which claimed full power to make laws for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Britain had dropped the tax and kept the principle, which set up the next round.

The next round followed the same pattern. The Townshend Acts of 1767 put duties on imported glass, lead, paint, paper and tea and used the money to pay royal governors and judges, which freed them from the colonial assemblies. John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania granted Parliament the power to regulate trade but rejected duties laid “for the single purpose of levying money upon us,” and colonists boycotted British goods again. In 1770 Parliament repealed every duty except the one on tea, which it kept to assert its right. The Tea Act of 1773 made taxed tea cheaper than smuggled tea, so buying it meant accepting that right. Bostonians dumped 342 chests of it into the harbor in December 1773, and Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts, which closed Boston's port and took over the Massachusetts government. In 1774 the First Continental Congress, with delegates from twelve colonies, replied that the foundation of free government was “a right in the people to participate in their legislative council” and organized a boycott enforced by committees in every town. Each round began with Parliament asserting its authority and ended with the colonists more organized against it.

Authority was not the only cause of conflict, though, and the colonists were not the only people in it. In 1763 Britain drew a line down the Appalachians and barred settlement west of it. For Native nations the conflict was about land and trade, not representation: that year the Odawa leader Pontiac called for war, and warriors from a dozen nations seized eight British forts. Many colonists who had fought to open the West saw the line as a betrayal, and thousands of settlers crossed it. The troops Britain sent to Boston in 1768 added another grievance, and the Boston Massacre of 1770 left five men dead. Even so, colonists folded these grievances into the argument about consent. In 1774 the First Continental Congress declared that keeping a standing army in the colonies in peacetime without the consent of the colony's legislature was “against law.” The language of consent also reached people the Patriots had not meant to include. In 1773 enslaved men in Boston wrote to members of the Massachusetts legislature to ask for their own liberty, and they turned the Patriots' words back on them: “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.”

The dispute over Parliament's authority did the most to turn protest into war, because Britain never gave up its claim even when it gave up its taxes, and because the claim joined colonists with different complaints into a common cause. It was not the whole story. Native nations fought over land on their own terms, and enslaved people used the colonists' language of consent to claim their own freedom. The argument over who could govern whom opened a larger question about whose liberty the Revolution would protect.

Why it works

Contextualization: the first three sentences describe the war debt, the end of salutary neglect and the turn to revenue laws, the situation that started the dispute.
Thesis: the last two sentences of the introduction make a defensible claim (authority was the main cause), give a reason (Parliament kept its claim each time it gave up a tax) and lay out the essay's line of reasoning.
Evidence: paragraphs 2 and 3 use many specific examples (the Stamp Act, Henry's resolves, the Stamp Act Congress, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts, Dickinson's letters, the Tea Act, the Coercive Acts and the First Continental Congress), and each one supports the claim instead of sitting in a list.
Historical reasoning: causation organizes the essay. Each paragraph shows a British claim of authority producing a stronger colonial response.
Complexity: paragraph 4 weighs other causes (land and troops) and other perspectives (Native nations and enslaved Bostonians), and explains how colonists tied those grievances back to consent. It changes the argument rather than decorating it, and it runs a full paragraph.
Scope: the essay covers 1763 to 1775 of a prompt that runs to 1877. The 2027 format allows that, as long as the thesis names a relevant development.

Common mistakes

Restating the prompt as a thesis, such as “Disputes over political authority caused a lot of conflict between 1754 and 1877.”
A thesis with no line of reasoning, such as “The colonists were angry about British taxes.” Add a reason or categories.
Trying to cover the whole span. A broad prompt tempts you into a thin survey; pick the development you can argue in depth.
Listing evidence without explaining it. Each example needs a sentence on how it supports your claim.
Using evidence from outside the prompt's dates or region, or repeating what the prompt already says.
Context that is one sentence of generalities (“America was changing”) instead of a short description of a real development.
Treating complexity as a closing line (“there were other causes too”) instead of a developed part of the argument.
Writing the LEQ in whatever time the DBQ leaves. Keep about 40 minutes for it.

What changes in May 2027

Before 2027, the LEQ offered three prompts, each set in a different span of years, and you answered one. Starting in May 2027, there is one required prompt covering about half of the course's time periods, with a short introductory statement that frames the task and suggests areas for analysis. You may focus on one or more of the developments it mentions, and you aren't expected to address the whole period.

The rubric doesn't change, and neither do the amount and type of evidence you need: at least two specific examples for the evidence points, and at least four if you aim to earn complexity through your evidence.

To prepare, practice with prompts from every part of the course, since you can't choose the period. Then, since you can choose your focus inside the prompt, build a set of four or five specific examples for the main developments of each period, so that whichever half of the course appears, you have ground you know well.

How to Write the APUSH LEQ