APUSH LEQ Rubric 2027: Examples and How to Write One

The LEQ on the May 2027 exam

The LEQ at a glance
	May 2027 exam
Prompts	One, and everyone answers it
Suggested time	40 minutes, inside Section II’s 1 hour 40 minutes for both essays
Share of your score	15%
Points	6
Span of the prompt	About half of the course’s time periods
Documents	None
How you write it	Typed in the Bluebook app
Exam day	Friday, May 7, 2027

Until 2026 you picked one of three prompts. From May 2027 everyone gets the same broad prompt, with a short opening statement that suggests what to write about, and you may focus on one development or several without covering the whole span. The rubric and the amount of evidence you need are unchanged; the exam guide has the rest of the 2027 changes.

It is the only prompt College Board has published in the new format, so every example on this page answers it, apart from two plans for older prompts near the end.

The 6 points, and where students lose them

Most students earn the thesis. Far fewer earn both analysis and reasoning points, and a 6 needs both. Here is the rubric with how students did on the six LEQ prompts of 2025. Each point is earned on its own, so missing one never blocks another.

The LEQ rubric, with 2025 results
Point	What earns it	2025, six prompts
Thesis (1)	A claim historians could defend that answers the prompt and shows a line of reasoning: a reason, or the categories you’ll argue	61–86% earned it
Contextualization (1)	The broader history before, during or after the prompt’s years that bears on its topic, in more than a phrase	55–85% earned it
Evidence (2)	1 point for two specific examples inside the prompt’s years; 2 points when two of them support an argument	Average 0.79–1.33 of 2
Analysis and reasoning (2)	1 point for using causation, comparison, or continuity and change to structure the argument; 1 more for a complex understanding	Average 0.46–0.92 of 2

From the 2025 Chief Reader reports, which give the average for each row on each prompt. For a one-point row the average is the share of students who earned it.

Thesis

The thesis needs a position and a reason. College Board accepts either a reason for the claim or the categories your essay will argue, in one or more sentences that sit together in the introduction or the conclusion. It must name a real development in the period, but it doesn’t have to cover all of it. Put it at the end of your introduction, where you and the reader can find it in seconds.

A formula that works for almost any prompt: In [years], [development] [changed or shaped] [what the prompt asks about] by [category one] and [category two]. Swap “by” for “because” when your line of reasoning is a single cause.

No point (restates the prompt): “Changes in political participation influenced American society between 1776 and 1876.”
No point (a claim with no line of reasoning): “Political participation changed American society a great deal in this period.” The 2023 Chief Readers reported many essays whose thesis amounted to saying something changed a lot.
Earns it: “In the early 1800s, as states dropped property requirements, nearly all white men gained the vote, which pushed parties to compete for ordinary voters but also led several states to take the vote away from free Black men.”

Contextualization

Write the context first, before the thesis, so you can’t forget it; in 2023 the Chief Readers saw some students skip it entirely. It can come from before the prompt’s start date, during the period or after it, and it must be more than a passing phrase. The bar is lower than many students think. College Board’s guidelines for the sample prompt accept, as the minimum, one specific sentence about who could vote in the colonies. Two or three sentences built on a named development are safer.

No point: “America changed a lot after the Revolution.”
Earns it: “In the colonial era, most colonies let only men who owned property vote, and voters usually elected wealthy planters, merchants and lawyers to their assemblies.”

Evidence

The first point needs two specific examples, such as a law, an event, a person, a group or a court case, inside the prompt’s years and region. The second needs two of them to support your argument. Evidence from outside the dates earns nothing, and so does repeating the prompt: “the creation of political parties” is already in the sample’s opening statement, so name a party, a campaign or a law instead.

The 2025 Chief Readers called the usual failure “listism”: three or four names in a row, none explained. Their fix is “closing the loop”. After each example, add the sentence that says what it shows about the prompt.

Named (first point at most): “Andrew Jackson won in 1828, and there was the spoils system.”
Used, toward the second point (you need two like this): “Jackson’s Democrats gave government jobs to loyal party workers, the spoils system, which gave ordinary men a personal reason to campaign and vote.”

Analysis and reasoning, and the complexity point

The first point goes to an essay organized by a reasoning process, so that each paragraph explains a cause or effect, a similarity or difference, or a change or continuity. It can be uneven and still count.

The second point, which students call the complexity point (some teachers say sophistication), goes to an essay that shows a complex understanding of the topic. College Board lists these routes, and one is enough:

explaining several causes or effects, several similarities or differences, or several continuities or changes;
explaining both halves of a process: cause and effect, similarity and difference, or continuity and change;
explaining more than one theme or perspective;
explaining a connection to another period or place, as long as it serves your argument;
using at least four specific pieces of evidence to support a nuanced argument, or using evidence to show different perspectives.

It can appear anywhere in the essay and doesn’t have to run through all of it, but it must be part of the argument and more than a phrase. A last line about other causes, or about the present day, earns nothing on its own. In 2024 and 2025 the Chief Readers wrote that the point is well within reach and that many students give it up by deciding it is too hard to try. The easiest route to plan is a second side to your argument, developed over a full paragraph, as the sample essay below does.

Choosing your focus in a half-course prompt

This is the new skill in 2027. A prompt that runs a hundred years tempts you to race through all of it, and a thin survey of a century usually costs the second evidence point and the complexity point. Spend the first two or three minutes choosing ground instead.

Name the developments the opening statement points to. The sample names three: a new government, debates over citizenship, and parties and institutions.
List the specifics you know for each, with dates, on scratch paper. Laws, elections, court cases, conventions, people.
Pick the development, or pair, where you reach at least four specifics inside the prompt’s years. Four is enough for both evidence points with room for the complexity route that runs on evidence.

Step 2 on the sample prompt: one student’s scratch list
Development	Specifics with dates	Count
A new government	Pennsylvania constitution lets taxpayers vote (1776); New Jersey lets propertied women vote until 1807; Constitution leaves voting rules to the states (1787)	3
Debates over citizenship	New York’s $250 rule for Black voters (1821); North Carolina (1835) and Pennsylvania (1838) take the vote from Black men; Seneca Falls (1848); Fifteenth Amendment (1870)	5
Parties and institutions	Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) enter the Union without property requirements for white men; New York drops its requirement for white voters (1821); turnout more than doubles (1824 to 1828); national conventions (1831–1832); spoils system; log-cabin campaign (1840)	5

The last two rows win, and they connect: the same decades that opened the vote to white men closed it to others. That pairing becomes the thesis of the sample essay, and its second half is the complexity move. The first row still helps, as context.

To get fast at this, keep an evidence bank: for each period, four or five specifics with a date and one line on what each one changed. Here are three lines from a bank like that:

Period 4, 1800–1848: the Indian Removal Act (1830) gave Jackson power to trade land in the West for Native lands in the Southeast, and the nations that refused were forced out, the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears (1838).
Period 6, 1865–1898: the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) barred Chinese laborers from entering the country for ten years, and Congress kept renewing it.
Period 8, 1945–1980: the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) ended the national-origins quotas and opened the way for large immigration from Asia and Latin America.

Causation, comparison, continuity and change

Your argument has to run on one of three reasoning processes. Older prompts often chose it for you; since 2025 the prompts have asked how one development shaped or responded to another, and the 2027 sample asks you to “explain how”, which leaves the choice to you. Readers don’t prefer any of the three. On the 2025 prompt about Native American adaptation, the Chief Readers found essays did best with causation and comparison, and few tried continuity and change.

The three reasoning processes
Process	What each paragraph explains	Words that cue it	A real prompt that invited it
Causation	A cause or an effect, and which mattered more	caused, led to, contributed to, influenced, responded to	2024: the relative importance of causes of conflict between Europeans and Native Americans, 1500–1763
Comparison	A similarity or a difference between groups, regions or periods, and why	compare, similar, different, contrast	2025: how sectional tensions shaped society, 1800–1848; readers saw essays compare the North and the South
Continuity and change	What changed across the years, what stayed the same, and how much	changed, extent of change, turning point, continuity	2023: how far transatlantic trade changed colonial society, 1607–1776

The complexity point has a version inside each process: weigh one cause against another, explain both similarity and difference, or explain both continuity and change. The 2023 Chief Readers noted many essays that set out to show both continuity and change and then described only one, which doesn’t earn the point.

The sample prompt, argued three ways

As causation (the sample essay below): “In the early 1800s, the spread of voting to almost all white men made politics and society more democratic, because parties had to compete for ordinary voters. At the same time it led states to shut free Black men out of voting, and that exclusion, along with women’s, pushed both groups to organize for their rights.”

Effect 1: mass politics. Property requirements dropped, turnout more than doubled from 1824 to 1828, conventions and the spoils system, the 1840 campaign.
Effect 2: a race and sex line. New York’s $250 rule (1821), North Carolina (1835), Pennsylvania (1838).
Effect 3, the complexity move: the excluded organize. Black conventions, the North Star (1847), Seneca Falls (1848).

As continuity and change: “From 1776 to 1876 the vote passed from men who owned property to nearly all men, the biggest change in who governed in that century, but most women stayed outside the electorate the whole time, and the vote Black men won after the Civil War was under violent attack by 1876.”

Starting point: property and taxpaying requirements after independence; New Jersey’s propertied women voters, cut off in 1807.
Change: white manhood suffrage, state by state from the 1810s; Black male suffrage under the Reconstruction Acts (1867) and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), with Hiram Revels in the Senate in 1870.
Continuity: women still shut out, from Seneca Falls (1848) to a Fifteenth Amendment that left out sex, with the Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870) territories the rare exceptions; violence such as the Colfax massacre (1873) and Mississippi’s 1875 election campaign eating away at Black voting.

As comparison: “White manhood suffrage in the 1820s and 1830s and Black male suffrage during Reconstruction both brought new voters into party politics and changed who held office, but the first had the white majority behind it and lasted, while the second depended on federal law and troops and met organized violence.”

Similarity: new voters remade the parties and the officeholders. Jackson’s Democrats built their party with the spoils system; Mississippi sent Hiram Revels (1870) and Blanche K. Bruce (1875) to the Senate.
Difference: the source. White men won the vote from state conventions and legislatures; Black men won it from Congress, through the Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment.
Difference: what lasted. White men kept the vote. Federal prosecutions broke the first Ku Klux Klan in 1871 and 1872, but groups such as the White League and the Red Shirts brought the violence back, and by 1876 Black voting was in retreat across much of the South.

A 6-point example essay, scored

We wrote this essay at the length and level of a strong student working for 35 minutes. It has no quotations: the rubric asks for none, and quoting from memory under time is a risk. It is our example, not a College Board sample.

Example essay: political participation, 1776–1876

College Board’s 2027 sample, in brief: explain how changes in political participation influenced American society between 1776 and 1876. You may focus on any change and don’t need to cover the whole period.

In the colonial era, most colonies let only men who owned property vote, and voters usually elected wealthy planters, merchants and lawyers to their assemblies. The Revolution challenged that. Patriots argued that government needed the consent of the governed, and during the war ordinary farmers and artisans served on local committees and in the militia. After independence some states widened the vote, and Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution let men vote if they paid taxes, even if they owned no land. In the early 1800s, the spread of voting to almost all white men made politics and society more democratic, because parties had to compete for ordinary voters. At the same time it led states to shut free Black men out of voting, and that exclusion, along with women’s, pushed both groups to organize for their rights.

Between the 1810s and the 1840s most states dropped property requirements for white men. New western states like Indiana in 1816 and Illinois in 1818 entered the Union without them, and New York removed its property requirement for white voters in 1821. Because so many more men could now vote, turnout in the presidential election more than doubled from 1824 to 1828, when Andrew Jackson won by running as the common man against what his supporters called the corrupt bargain that had made John Quincy Adams president. The parties changed to win these voters. They began holding national nominating conventions in 1831 and 1832 instead of letting leaders in Congress choose candidates, and Jackson’s Democrats gave government jobs to loyal supporters through the spoils system, which gave ordinary men a personal reason to work for a party. By 1840 the Whigs used the same style, running William Henry Harrison as a log-cabin candidate with parades and rallies even though he came from a wealthy Virginia family, and about 80 percent of eligible voters turned out. Elections had become events that ordinary men took part in, and a candidate’s wealth and family now mattered less than seeming like one of them.

However, the same expansion made race and sex the line that decided who could take part. When New York dropped the property requirement for white men in 1821, it imposed a separate $250 property requirement on Black men, which most of them could not meet. North Carolina took the vote from free Black men in 1835, and Pennsylvania did the same in 1838. Voting was becoming a right of white men in particular, and that white majority also backed the removal of Native Americans. Many white voters in Georgia wanted Cherokee land, and Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which led to the Trail of Tears in 1838. The groups that were shut out responded by organizing. Free Black northerners held conventions and started newspapers, like Frederick Douglass’s North Star in 1847. Women collected many of the signatures on the antislavery petitions of the 1830s, so many petitions that the House adopted a gag rule in 1836 to stop debating them, and that work led some women to ask for rights of their own. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments demanded equal rights for women, including the vote, and Douglass spoke for the voting resolution. So the spread of the vote to white men did not make society equal, but it gave the groups left out a reason to demand a share in politics.

The spread of voting to white men in the early 1800s turned politics into a mass activity and weakened the idea that only the wealthy should lead. It also drew a sharper line around race and sex, and the fight over that line continued. After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 barred states from denying the vote because of race, but it left out women, and the women’s suffrage movement split over whether to support it.

How it scores

Thesis	1/1	The last two sentences of the first paragraph: a defensible claim with its reason (parties had to compete for ordinary voters) and a second category (exclusion that pushed Black Americans and women to organize). Together, in one place, about developments inside the period.
Contextualization	1/1	The first four sentences describe colonial property requirements, the Revolution’s argument for consent and Pennsylvania’s 1776 change. That is broader history from before and at the start of the period, and it runs well past a phrase.
Evidence	2/2	Far more than two specific examples inside 1776–1876, among them Indiana and Illinois, New York in 1821, the 1828 and 1840 elections, the conventions, the spoils system, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Indian removal, the North Star and Seneca Falls. Each body paragraph ends by saying what its evidence shows about society, which earns the second point.
Analysis and reasoning	2/2	Causation structures both body paragraphs: a change in who could vote, then its effects. The complexity point comes from the third paragraph, which explains effects on several groups (free Black men, women, Native nations) and sets the widening of the vote against new exclusion, using far more than four specifics. The last paragraph’s link to the Fifteenth Amendment adds a connection to Reconstruction.

Notice what the essay leaves out. It never mentions the Civil War until the last paragraph, and it spends almost nothing on 1776 to 1810 after the context. The prompt allows that, and the time saved goes into explaining each piece of evidence.

The colonial and Revolutionary background in the opening is in our Unit 3 lessons:

The essay’s evidence is on the topic pages for Expanding Democracy (4.7), Jackson and Federal Power (4.8), An Age of Reform (4.11), African Americans in the Early Republic (4.12) and Reconstruction (5.10).

A 4-point essay: solid, and two points short

The average 2025 LEQ scored 3.35 out of 6 on one version of the exam and 3.39 on the other. This shorter essay, also ours, is better than average and still misses two points many students miss: context and complexity.

Example essay at 4 points

The expansion of voting rights between 1776 and 1876 changed American society by making politics more democratic for white men and by leading to new reform movements.

In the early 1800s many states got rid of the rule that you had to own property to vote, so more white men could vote than ever before. Andrew Jackson took advantage of this in the election of 1828, when he ran as a champion of the common man and won. Once in office, Jackson used the spoils system to give government jobs to his supporters, which made ordinary people feel that the government belonged to them. Because there were so many new voters, parties started holding big rallies and conventions to win them over, like the Whigs did in the log-cabin campaign of 1840.

Expanded voting also led to reform movements. Women were not allowed to vote, and many of them were active in the abolitionist movement. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded equal rights, including the right to vote. After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, which was a big change in who could participate.

Overall, the expansion of political participation made the United States more democratic, although not everyone was included.

How it scores

Thesis	1/1	The first sentence makes a defensible claim with two categories, more democratic politics for white men and new reform movements.
Contextualization	0/1	There is none. The essay starts with its thesis, and “not everyone was included” at the end is a passing phrase.
Evidence	2/2	Specific examples inside the period (property requirements dropped, the 1828 election, the spoils system, the 1840 campaign, Seneca Falls, the Fifteenth Amendment), and the second paragraph uses them to support the claim about democratic politics.
Analysis and reasoning	1/2	Causation structures the essay (wider voting, so parties competed for voters), which earns the first point. The argument has one side only. The closing phrase about who was left out is a reference, so there is no complexity.

Two changes take it to a 6. Add two or three sentences of context before the thesis, on who could vote in the colonies and what the Revolution changed. Then turn “not everyone was included” into a paragraph: New York’s $250 rule for Black voters in 1821, North Carolina and Pennsylvania taking the vote from Black men in the 1830s, and the organizing that followed. That paragraph also repairs the weakest link in the essay, which claims that expanded voting led to reform without saying how; the honest link is that women were shut out of the new electorate, and some of them demanded the vote for themselves.

Two more prompts, planned

The 2027 prompt could land anywhere in the course, so here are plans for two released prompts from later periods. The second had the lowest average of all six 2025 prompts, 2.53 of 6; the Chief Readers said many essays never connected the economic changes to how society responded.

2026: how westward expansion shaped U.S. society, 1865–1898

Thesis: “From 1865 to 1898, westward expansion opened land and work for white settlers and immigrants, but it broke the independence of the Plains nations and set off a backlash against Chinese workers.” Reasoning: causation, organized by the groups affected.

Settlers and the economy: the transcontinental railroad (1869), the cattle drives and the farming boom on the Plains, Black Exodusters moving to Kansas (1879).
Plains nations: the near-destruction of the bison herds, Little Bighorn (1876), the Dawes Act (1887), Wounded Knee (1890).
Chinese workers, the complexity paragraph: thousands built the Central Pacific line, then the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) barred new Chinese laborers. Opportunity for one group and exclusion for another is a second perspective.

Study it: Topic 6.2: Westward Expansion: Economic Development and Topic 6.9: Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age.

2025: how U.S. society responded to economic change, 1960–2000

Thesis: “Americans answered the economic shocks of the 1970s by moving south and west for jobs and by turning to conservative economic policies, while industrial workers in the Northeast and Midwest lost jobs and union strength.” Reasoning: causation, with each paragraph pairing one economic change with one response.

The change: the oil embargo (1973), stagflation, factory closings in the Rust Belt.
Response one: migration to the Sun Belt, where defense contracts and new industries drew workers and the population grew.
Response two: the tax revolt and the New Right, from California’s Proposition 13 (1978) to Ronald Reagan’s election (1980) and his tax cuts (1981).
Response three, the complexity paragraph: the same years from the workers’ side. Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers (1981), union membership kept falling, and the 1990s argument over NAFTA (1994) turned on factory jobs moving abroad.

Study it: Topic 9.2: Reagan and Conservatism and Topic 9.4: A Changing Economy.

The mistakes readers flag every year

College Board’s Chief Reader reports list what went wrong on each prompt, and the same mistakes return every year.

Recurring LEQ mistakes, from the 2023–2025 Chief Reader reports
The mistake	Where readers saw it	The fix
Answering the question next to the real one	2024: on migration from 1932 to 2000, essays mixed up the causes of migration with its effects. 2025: essays on Native American adaptation wrote about what Europeans did; essays on foreign policy from 1890 to 1930 described world events or domestic policy.	Mark who the prompt is about and the relationship it asks for, then check your thesis against both.
Evidence from the wrong years	2024: Manifest Destiny placed in 1754–1800, the Dawes Act in the colonial era, the Nineteenth Amendment in 1945–1980. 2025: the Second World War and the Cold War in essays on 1890–1930.	Date every piece of evidence in your plan. Anything outside the window can still serve as context or as a connection, labelled as earlier or later.
Listing instead of using	2025: “listism”, several names in a row with nothing explained. 2024: names dropped without their significance.	After each example, write the sentence that says what it shows about the prompt.
Context that is only a generality	2023, 2024 and 2025. The 2025 report’s better version replaced a line about America staying out of foreign quarrels with Washington’s Farewell Address and its advice on neutrality.	Build the context on one named event or development.
Treating a group as one	Native Americans as a single people (2024); the thirteen colonies as one society (2023); abolitionism as the view of the whole North (2025).	Name the nation, the colony or the region, and say how it differed.
Absolutes	2024: a claim that social movements ended all racial discrimination, which isn’t defensible.	Qualify it. The report’s own fix changed all to several forms.
Mixing up look-alikes	The Big Stick policy blamed for the Spanish-American War (2025); the Missouri Compromise run together with the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (2023 and 2025); the First and Second Red Scares (2023); the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars (2024).	Learn these in pairs, with their dates.

Your 40 minutes

A 40-minute plan
Minutes	What to do
0–5	Read the opening statement and the task. Mark what the prompt is about and what it asks you to explain. Choose your ground with the three steps above, list your evidence with dates, pick the reasoning process, and draft the thesis and your complexity paragraph in a line each.
5–10	Introduction: two or three sentences of context, then the thesis.
10–30	Two body paragraphs. Each one opens with a claim, gives specific evidence and closes the loop.
30–37	The complexity paragraph: the second side, the other group, or the continuity behind the change.
37–40	A sentence or two of conclusion, then check every date against the prompt’s years.

Section II gives you 1 hour 40 minutes for both essays, and you can move between them. On the 2026 exam the directions also said that scratch paper is fine for planning but only what you type into the response is scored, and that the clock turns red at five minutes with no warning from the proctor. If time runs short, drop the conclusion before you drop the complexity paragraph; the conclusion earns nothing by itself.

Questions students ask about the LEQ

How long should an APUSH LEQ be?

The rubric sets no length. What it rewards is a thesis, context, evidence that supports an argument, historical reasoning and, for a 6, a complex understanding, which a developed second side is one way to show. In 40 minutes of typing that usually comes to an introduction, two or three body paragraphs and a short conclusion. Our 6-point example is about 650 words and the 4-point one about 220. Most of the gap between them is two paragraphs: the context and the complexity paragraph.

How many paragraphs, and do I need a conclusion?

There is no required number. Four or five paragraphs is the usual shape: introduction, two or three body paragraphs, conclusion. No point goes to the conclusion itself, but it is a fine place for the thesis if you wrote a better one at the end, and for a connection to a later period.

Can I write about just one development?

Yes. College Board says you may focus on one or more of the developments the prompt names and are not expected to cover the whole period. Your thesis still has to name the development you chose.

Do I write the LEQ or the DBQ first?

Write the DBQ first unless you have a reason not to: it is worth more (25% of the exam against 15%), and College Board’s directions put it first with a suggested hour. You can move between the two essays during Section II, so if you know exactly what you’ll argue on the LEQ, writing it first is a reasonable choice. Either way, protect the LEQ’s 40 minutes.

Do spelling and grammar count?

Not unless they hide what you mean. College Board’s scoring notes treat every essay as a first draft, and small factual slips don’t sink an essay as long as the history your argument depends on is accurate.

Practice with real prompts

Every LEQ in 2025 and 2026 asked students to evaluate how one development shaped, or responded to, another. These are the latest nine, summarized, with College Board’s average where it has been published. They cover shorter spans than the 2027 prompt will, but they are scored on the same rubric.

Released LEQ prompts, 2025–2026
Exam	What the prompt asked about	Average (of 6)
2026	How geography shaped European colonization of the Americas, 1500–1754	Not yet published
2026	How westward expansion shaped U.S. society, 1865–1898	Not yet published
2026	How politics shaped U.S. society, 1945–2000	Not yet published
2025, Set 1	How Native American societies adapted to European colonists in North America, 1500–1754	3.13
2025, Set 1	How reform movements responded to industrialization, 1820–1900	3.21
2025, Set 1	How U.S. foreign policy responded to a changing world, 1890–1930	3.81
2025, Set 2	How British colonists adapted to their environments in the Americas, 1607–1754	3.27
2025, Set 2	How sectional tensions shaped U.S. society, 1800–1848	3.85
2025, Set 2	How U.S. society responded to economic change, 1960–2000	2.53

Summarized, not quoted. Set 1 and Set 2 were different versions of the 2025 exam. Averages from the 2025 Chief Reader reports.

The exact wording is in College Board’s free-response PDFs for 2026, 2025 Set 1 and 2025 Set 2, and older years are on AP Central’s past exam questions page, with College Board’s scored student samples for 2023 to 2025.

To practice the 2027 move, take the sample prompt and plan it three times, once for each stretch of its span (1776–1800, 1800–1848, 1848–1876), five minutes each. Then write one of them in full, typed and timed at 40 minutes, because the exam is typed in Bluebook. When you finish, score it here before you compare it with the examples above:

Score your own LEQ

The DBQ guide covers the other Section II essay, which shares the thesis, context and complexity rows. For the sample essay’s history, see the Unit 4 and Unit 5 pages; for its colonial and Revolutionary background, the Unit 3 cheat sheet.

APUSH LEQ: Rubric, Examples and How to Write One