The short-answer section in May 2027
The short-answer questions (SAQs) are the second part of Section I, right after the 55 multiple-choice questions. You type your answers in the Bluebook app. Write in full sentences: on the 2026 exam the directions said an outline or a bulleted list alone was not acceptable.
| May 2027 exam | |
|---|---|
| Questions | 3, and you answer all of them |
| Time | 40 minutes for all three; College Board suggests about 13 minutes each |
| Share of your AP score | 20% |
| Points | 9: three parts per question, 1 point each |
| Years covered | 1491 to 2001, with each question from a different period |
| Question 1 | Secondary sources: usually excerpts from two historians who disagree |
| Question 2 | A primary source in writing: a speech, letter, law, or article from the period |
| Question 3 | A source that isn’t text, primary or secondary: an image, cartoon, map, chart, or graph |
Until 2026 you answered Questions 1 and 2 and then chose between two questions that had no source at all. That choice is gone. The scoring and the amount of evidence each part needs stayed the same, and the rest of the 2027 changes are on the exam page.
Don’t treat this section as a warm-up for the essays. The three SAQs count for 20% of your score, more than the long essay’s 15%, in the same 40 minutes.
How students score on the SAQs
After every exam, the Chief Reader, the college professor who leads the scoring, publishes a report with the average score on each part of each question. These are the 2025 averages, the most recent published. On a 1-point part, the average is the share of students who earned the point, so 0.27 means 27%.
| Question | What it asked about | Part A | Part B | Part C | Total (of 3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Set 1, Q1 | Two historians on early U.S. politics, 1789–1820 | 0.60 | 0.27 | 0.34 | 1.20 |
| Set 1, Q2 | A Daniel Webster speech and sectional politics, 1820–1865 | 0.58 | 0.45 | 0.41 | 1.43 |
| Set 1, Q3 | Colonial politics, 1607–1783 (no source) | 0.42 | 0.73 | 0.72 | 1.80 |
| Set 1, Q4 | Reconstruction and federal power, 1865–1945 (no source) | 0.54 | 0.47 | 0.43 | 1.43 |
| Set 2, Q1 | Two historians on the origins of the Cold War | 0.66 | 0.38 | 0.60 | 1.64 |
| Set 2, Q2 | Mary Church Terrell’s 1897 speech and Black women’s activism | 0.71 | 0.43 | 0.40 | 1.55 |
| Set 2, Q3 | Revolutionary and early U.S. politics, 1763–1840 (no source) | 0.67 | 0.60 | 0.29 | 1.50 |
| Set 2, Q4 | Political debates, 1910–1970 (no source) | 0.49 | 0.47 | 0.40 | 1.37 |
Add up a whole section and the average student earned about 4.3 of the 9 points on one version and 4.6 on the other, roughly half. On the same exams the DBQ averaged 54% and 56% of its points and the long essay about 56%.
The lost points cluster in Parts B and C. Part A, which usually asks about the source in front of you or about a single development, scored best on seven of the eight questions. Parts B and C ask you to bring your own evidence from inside a date range and explain it.
The weakest part of all was Part B of Set 1’s first question: 27% of students earned it. It asked for evidence from 1789 to 1820 that supported a historian’s argument that American politics grew more democratic. The Chief Reader reported that many students reached outside those years, and some offered Andrew Jackson, who wasn’t elected president until 1828. The one Part A that scored badly, on Set 1’s colonial question, went wrong in a similar way. Asked for a political development from 1607 to 1753, students named no specific institution or chose events from 1754 and later.
Describe and explain: the only two verbs
College Board’s course description defines six task verbs, but the short-answer section uses two. Of the 108 SAQ parts College Board released from 2021 through 2026, 44 began “Briefly describe” and the other 64 began “Briefly explain.” None asked you to identify. Comparison questions use them too: every Question 1 in those years opened with “Briefly describe one major difference.”
Describe
College Board defines describe as giving “the relevant characteristics of a specified topic,” and its scoring notes add that a description needs more than an isolated term. Name the thing, then say what it was or what it did, specifically enough that a reader can tell you understand it. One or two sentences usually do it.
| Answer | Point? |
|---|---|
| “One effect was the Columbian Exchange.” | No. It names the topic of the question instead of an effect of it. |
| “Smallpox.” | No. An isolated term is not a description. |
| “Smallpox and measles, carried by Europeans, spread through Native communities that had no immunity to them and killed a large share of the people of the Caribbean and central Mexico in the 1500s.” | Yes. It names the effect and gives its characteristics: which diseases, whom they struck, where, and when. |
Explain
Explain means saying how or why something happened, or how two things are connected, using evidence or reasoning. Most explain parts hand you something to connect to: the source, a historian’s argument, or a development named in the question. So an explanation has two halves, the evidence and the link back to the question, and the link is the sentence students leave out. The Chief Readers in 2024 and 2025 both told teachers that their students blurred describe and explain.
| Answer | Point? |
|---|---|
| “Ronald Reagan, a conservative, was elected president in 1980.” | No. It describes a development but never says how the development reflects conservatism. |
| “Reagan won in 1980 promising to shrink the federal government, and the tax law he signed in 1981 cut income taxes sharply, dropping the top rate from 70% to 50%. It turned into law the conservative argument that tax cuts would revive the economy better than federal spending could.” | Yes. The evidence is specific, and the second sentence explains how it reflects conservatism. |
Answer, cite, explain (the ACE method)
Most teachers teach the SAQ with an acronym, and College Board’s own readers use the most common one. The 2024 Chief Reader report called ACE “a well-known strategy around the country” and defined it: answer the question directly, cite a specific piece of historical evidence (teachers often call it a proper noun), then explain how that evidence supports your answer. The 2025 report recommended it again.
The 2024 report also said where students go wrong with it: the cite and the explain. A cite has to be something you could look up, such as a law, a court case, a person, a group, or an event, with its year if you know it. “Taxes” and “the government” are not citations. The explain has to point back at the question. A sentence that only adds more detail about the evidence is still part of the cite.
Some classes use different letters for the same three moves. Use whichever you learned. Readers score what your sentences do, and no acronym earns a point by itself.
How long should each answer be?
The scoring rules set no word count or required number of sentences. Two to four sentences per part is the usual size. The eight 3-point answers College Board published from the 2025 exam ran from about 200 to 380 words for all three parts together, roughly 70 to 130 words a part. Length didn’t buy points. On one version of the exam, the published 1-point answers ran from 153 to 228 words, longer than some of the 3s.
Do you need a thesis or an introduction?
No. Label your answers A, B, and C, start each one with the answer itself, and stop when the part is done. Each part is scored on its own, so a strong Part C can’t rescue a weak Part A, and a weak Part A costs you nothing on Part C. Spelling and grammar don’t count against you unless a reader can’t tell what you meant.
Question 1: two historians (the real 2026 question)
In recent released exams, Question 1 gives you short excerpts from historians who read the same history differently. In those questions, Part A asks for the difference between them, and Parts B and C ask for evidence that supports each historian, from a date range, and “not directly mentioned in the excerpts.” The newest example is the first question on the 2026 exam, which put two historians of Reconstruction side by side.
In the first excerpt, from a 2003 book, Claudine L. Ferrell argues that Reconstruction failed. Most Northerners never shared the Radical Republicans’ goal of remaking the South, and they still believed the states should hold most of the power, so by the late 1800s the nation turned away and “left the South to govern itself.” In the second, from a 2014 book, Mark Summers argues that most Americans in 1865 cared most about restoring the Union, and that by that measure Reconstruction was “a lasting and unappreciated success”: the Union held, slavery was never revived, and the federal system recovered.
Briefly describe one major difference between Ferrell’s and Summers’s historical interpretations of Reconstruction.
Part B asks you to explain how one event or development from 1861 to 1900, not directly mentioned in the excerpts, could support Ferrell’s argument, and Part C asks the same for Summers. The full excerpts are in College Board’s 2026 free-response questions. This answer is ours, scored against the 2026 scoring guidelines.
A. Describe one major difference between the two interpretations. B. Explain how one event or development from 1861 to 1900 that the excerpts don’t mention supports Ferrell. C. Do the same for Summers.
A. Ferrell and Summers judge Reconstruction by different goals, so they reach opposite verdicts. Ferrell measures it by whether it remade Southern society, and she calls it a failure because most Northerners never shared the Radical Republicans’ aims. Summers measures it by whether it restored the Union for good, and by that test he calls it a lasting success.
B. The Supreme Court’s Civil Rights Cases of 1883 support Ferrell. The Court struck down the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that banned racial discrimination in inns, theaters, and railroad cars, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment limited what states did, not what private businesses did. The decision shows the national government stepping back from protecting Black Southerners and leaving their rights to Southern states, the retreat Ferrell describes.
C. The Thirteenth Amendment supports Summers. Ratified in December 1865 with the votes of Southern states that had just fought a war to keep slavery, it abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime after conviction, and it held even after white Democrats took back control of Southern governments in the 1870s. The war’s central result lasted, which is the kind of success Summers says Reconstruction achieved.
How it scores
| Part A | 1/1 | It states a real difference in its first sentence, the standard each historian uses, and then describes each side. A reader doesn’t have to hunt for the difference. |
|---|---|---|
| Part B | 1/1 | A specific case with its year, inside 1861 to 1900 and not in either excerpt. The last sentence is the explain: it ties the ruling to Ferrell’s argument about a nation that pulled back. |
| Part C | 1/1 | A specific amendment with its date, in range. The answer explains why it fits Summers: his test is whether the war’s results lasted, and this one did. |
The history for this question is in Reconstruction (Topic 5.10) and Failure of Reconstruction (Topic 5.11).
Question 2: a primary source (practice from 1676)
Question 2 gives you one text written at the time: a speech, a letter, a law, a pamphlet. The parts usually ask about the source itself (its purpose, its author’s point of view, its audience, or the situation it came from), then about a development that led to it and one that followed. The 2026 question was built on a 1761 speech by the Anishinaabe leader Minweweh and asked for exactly those three things. This practice question follows the same pattern with a source from colonial Virginia.
For having, upon specious pretenses of public works, raised great unjust taxes upon the commonalty for the advancement of private favorites and other sinister ends, but no visible effects in any measure adequate … For having protected, favored, and emboldened the Indians against his Majesty’s loyal subjects, never contriving, requiring, or appointing any due or proper means of satisfaction for their many invasions, robberies, and murders committed upon us. … Of this and the aforesaid articles we accuse Sir William Berkeley as guilty of each and every one of the same …
Commonalty means the common people, and satisfaction means payment or punishment for a wrong. Bacon signed the declaration as “General by Consent of the people.”
A. Briefly describe one likely purpose of Bacon’s declaration. B. Briefly explain how one development from 1607 to 1675 contributed to the grievances in the excerpt. C. Briefly explain how one development from 1677 to 1750 resulted from the conflict described in the excerpt.
A. Bacon’s purpose was to justify an armed rebellion against Governor William Berkeley by presenting it as the people’s case against a corrupt governor. The declaration accuses Berkeley of taxing the common people to reward his favorites and of protecting the Indians who were raiding frontier farms. Bacon signed it as “General by Consent of the people,” claiming that his authority came from the colonists and not from the governor.
B. Before 1675, wealthy planters claimed most of the good land along Virginia’s rivers, helped by the headright system, which granted 50 acres for each person whose passage to the colony a planter paid. Servants who finished their indentures found little land left except on the frontier, on land Native nations still held. Those frontier farmers were the colonists being raided in 1675 and 1676, and they blamed a governor who refused to give Bacon a commission to lead a war against Native peoples, the grievance behind Bacon’s fourth charge.
C. After the rebellion, Virginia’s planters bought more and more enslaved Africans and relied less on indentured servants. An enslaved worker was held for life and would never become a free man demanding land and a gun, as Bacon’s followers had. In 1705 Virginia gathered its slave laws into one code that treated enslaved people as property and gave white servants protections it denied to enslaved Black people. Many historians see that hardening of slavery and race as one result of the fright the rebellion gave Virginia’s elite.
How it scores
| Part A | 1/1 | A clear purpose in the first sentence, supported by what the source says and by how Bacon signed it. It goes past a label (“to complain”) to what the declaration was meant to do. |
|---|---|---|
| Part B | 1/1 | A specific development inside 1607 to 1675, the headright system, explained step by step until it reaches the frontier grievance in the source. |
| Part C | 1/1 | A specific result inside 1677 to 1750, the 1705 slave code, with the link to the rebellion explained. The last sentence marks the link as historians’ interpretation, which keeps the claim defensible. The Treaty of Middle Plantation of 1677, which Virginia made with several Native nations after the fighting, would also work. |
The dates in Part C are the trap in this question. Here is an answer that knows the history and still earns nothing.
C. In 1662 Virginia passed a law saying that a child born to an enslaved mother would also be enslaved, so slavery became something a person inherited.
How it scores
| Part C | 0/1 | The law is real and the description is accurate, but 1662 falls before the part’s window of 1677 to 1750, and a law passed fourteen years before the rebellion can’t be one of its results. Evidence outside the dates earns nothing. The same idea in the right years, the 1705 code, earns the point. |
|---|
Bacon’s Rebellion and the slave laws Virginia wrote before and after it are Topics 2.5 and 2.6:
Question 3: a chart, map, or image
Question 3 is the new one. Its source isn’t text: it might be a painting, a cartoon, a photograph, a poster, a map, or a graph. It can be primary, made at the time, or secondary, like a graph a historian built from census numbers. Images have appeared in short-answer questions before, including a 1936 Social Security poster and an 1874 temperance print on the 2024 exam, but from May 2027 every exam has a non-text question.
Read it like a document
A chart or an image has a source line, and it matters as much as a document’s. Before you answer, settle four things.
- Who made it, and when. The date anchors everything else. In 2024 some students read that 1874 temperance print as a picture of the Whiskey Rebellion or the Revolution, and lost Part A.
- What it shows or measures. Read the title, the labels, the units, and any key.
- What changes. On a chart or a map, find the trend and the stretch where it moves fastest. In a picture, find what the artist exaggerates.
- Why it was made. A poster or a cartoon wants you to think or do something. Say what.
Here is a practice question built on numbers from the U.S. census. On the exam a source like this would most likely be drawn as a graph.
| Census year | Black population | South | Northeast and Midwest | West |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1910 | 9.8 million | 89.0% | 10.5% | 0.5% |
| 1920 | 10.5 million | 85.2% | 14.1% | 0.8% |
| 1930 | 11.9 million | 78.7% | 20.3% | 1.0% |
| 1940 | 12.9 million | 77.0% | 21.7% | 1.3% |
| 1950 | 15.0 million | 68.0% | 28.2% | 3.8% |
| 1960 | 18.9 million | 59.9% | 34.3% | 5.8% |
| 1970 | 22.6 million | 53.0% | 39.5% | 7.5% |
A. Briefly describe one change in where Black Americans lived from 1910 to 1970, as shown in the table. B. Briefly explain one cause of the change shown in the table from 1910 to 1940. C. Briefly explain one effect of the change shown in the table on United States politics from 1940 to 1970.
A. The share of Black Americans living in the South fell from 89% in 1910 to 53% in 1970, while the share living in the Northeast and Midwest rose from about 11% to about 40%. The fall was steepest after 1940: the South’s share dropped 12 points in the thirty years before 1940 and 24 points in the thirty years after.
B. The First World War sharply reduced immigration from Europe just as Northern factories needed more workers for war production. Employers sent recruiters south, and Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender urged readers to come north for wages far higher than sharecropping paid. Many migrants were also escaping Jim Crow laws and the threat of lynching.
C. Black migrants could vote in Northern cities, unlike in most of the South, and by the 1940s they were a large bloc of voters in states with many electoral votes, such as New York, Illinois, and Michigan. In 1948 the Democratic convention adopted a civil rights plank that drove some Southern Democrats out of the party to run Strom Thurmond as a Dixiecrat, and later that month President Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces. Where Black Americans now lived had helped make civil rights a national political issue.
How it scores
| Part A | 1/1 | It describes the change with numbers read from the table. The second sentence notices when the change was fastest, which is the habit that sets up Parts B and C. |
|---|---|---|
| Part B | 1/1 | A specific cause inside 1910 to 1940 (wartime demand for labor after European immigration fell sharply), with the recruiters and the Defender as the mechanism. The last sentence adds a push factor alongside the pull. |
| Part C | 1/1 | A specific political effect inside 1940 to 1970, explained through voting: the migrants could vote where they moved, and national politicians answered them. |
B. Black Americans moved north from 1910 to 1940 because of the Great Migration.
How it scores
| Part B | 0/1 | The Great Migration is the name of the change the table shows, so it can’t be its cause. A cause is something else that made people move: wartime factory jobs, the boll weevil’s damage to cotton farming, Jim Crow. |
|---|
Pictures need the same care with dates. In 2024, students who saw the 1936 Social Security poster sometimes credited it to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, about thirty years too late. The date was printed in the source line.
The Great Migration is part of World War I: Home Front (Topic 7.6), and the 1948 fight over civil rights is in Early Steps in the Civil Rights Movement (Topic 8.6).
The mistakes readers report every year
Each of these comes from a Chief Reader report on the 2024 or 2025 exam.
- Evidence from the wrong years. It tops the list almost every year. Besides Jackson for 1789 to 1820, students in 2025 used events from the 1930s and the 1990s on a Cold War question limited to 1940 to 1960. Write each part’s dates above your answer and check your evidence against them before you write it.
- A group with no name. When a part asks how a group responded, a broad statement doesn’t count; the 2025 report’s own example was “people campaigned for more government involvement.” The better answers named a real group, such as the Loyalists or the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and said what it did.
- The wrong kind of development. A 2025 question asked for a political development during Reconstruction, and many students gave an economic one instead and never connected it to politics. If a part says political, answer with politics.
- Look-alike movements. In 2025 students used the Populists and the Progressives as if they were one movement. The Populists’ People’s Party peaked in the 1890s; the Progressive movement belongs to the 1900s and 1910s. Learn confusable pairs together, with their dates.
- Misreading the author’s purpose. Many students in 2025 misread the purpose of a Daniel Webster speech. The better answers saw that he was arguing for national unity. Read the whole excerpt and its source line before you decide what the author wanted.
- A term with nothing after it. In 2024 students could name laissez-faire, the New Deal, and Medicare, but often couldn’t say what any of them did. A term earns nothing until a sentence describes it.
A 13-minute routine for each question
College Board suggests about 13 minutes a question. You can move back and forth between the three, and on the 2026 exam the clock simply turned red with five minutes left, with no warning from the proctor. A fixed routine stops one hard question from eating the time you need for the other two.
- Minutes 0–2. Read the source line, then all three parts, before the source itself. Mark every date range and every verb.
- Minutes 2–4. Read the source. On scratch paper, write one specific piece of evidence for each part, with its year, and check each year against that part’s range.
- Minutes 4–12. Write A, B, and C, about two and a half minutes each: the answer, the evidence, the explanation.
- Minutes 12–13. Reread each part against its verb (does every explain have a because or a so?) and its dates.
Write something for every part. A wrong answer costs you no more than a blank one, and one accurate sentence with one specific piece of evidence often earns the point.
Practice with real questions
College Board posts every recent short-answer question on its past exam questions page, with the scoring guidelines, scored student answers through 2025, and the Chief Reader reports quoted on this page. Give yourself 13 minutes, then score each part against the guidelines before you read the samples. The image questions from 2021 and 2024 are the closest practice for the new Question 3.
The two essays have their own guides: the DBQ and the long essay, with a separate page on earning the complexity point in both.
Sources
- AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description, 2026: exam format, short-answer section, task verbs, sample question and scoring guidelines, pp. 497–525 (PDF)
- AP United States History Exam (AP Central)
- AP History Exam Updates for May 2027 (AP Central)
- 2026 AP U.S. History Free-Response Questions (PDF)
- 2026 AP U.S. History Scoring Guidelines (PDF)
- 2025 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 1 (PDF)
- 2025 Chief Reader Report, AP U.S. History Set 2 (PDF)
- 2025 AP U.S. History Scoring Statistics, Set 1 (PDF)
- 2025 AP U.S. History Scoring Statistics, 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)
- 2025 SAQ sample responses and scoring commentary, Set 1, Question 1 (PDF; the other questions follow the same address pattern)
- AP U.S. History recent past exam questions: free-response questions, scoring guidelines, samples (AP Central)
- Nathaniel Bacon, “The Declaration of the People,” 1676, modern-spelling text from Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., vol. 9 (1871), via History Matters, George Mason University
- Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, U.S. Census Bureau Working Paper 56, 2002 (PDF)
- Thirteenth Amendment: text and ratification date (National Archives)
- President Truman, Executive Order 9981, July 26, 1948 (Truman Library)
- Economic Report of the President, February 1982: the 1981 tax law and top-rate reduction (American Presidency Project)