Entering an APUSH practice exam
Count the multiple-choice questions you answered correctly out of 55. Then score the written parts on College Board’s rubrics: each short-answer question from 0 to 3, one point per part; the document-based question from 0 to 7; the long essay from 0 to 6. The DBQ and long-essay rubrics name their rows (thesis, contextualization, evidence, analysis and reasoning), so award the points row by row instead of guessing an overall mark.
From May 2027 every short-answer question comes with a source, and there is a single long-essay prompt, so practise with all three SAQs and one LEQ, as the real exam will have it.
A prep company’s lines, said plainly
US History is one of the most taken AP exams, yet we found no College Board conversion chart for its current format. Rather than leave it out, this page uses the estimated cutoffs Fiveable publishes for the 2027 exam, whose 100-point composite follows College Board’s own 40/20/25/15 weights, so your weighted score maps straight onto it. The lines themselves are Fiveable’s judgement, not data College Board has released, and the page labels them that way under every result.
Read an APUSH estimate as a direction: whether you’re broadly in 3, 4 or 5 territory and which part of the exam would move you most. For a World History comparison on an official, if older, College Board chart, see the AP World History calculator.
AP United States History exam format, May 2027
| Part | Scored out of | Share of score |
|---|---|---|
| Section I, Part A: Multiple choice · 55 min · 40% | ||
| Multiple-choice questions correct | 55 | 40% |
| Section I, Part B: Short answer · 40 min · 20% | ||
| Short answer 1 · Secondary text source(s), 0–3 | 3 | 6.7% |
| Short answer 2 · Primary text source, 0–3 | 3 | 6.7% |
| Short answer 3 · Primary or secondary non-text source, 0–3 | 3 | 6.7% |
| Section II: Document-based question · 1 h · 25% | ||
| DBQ · Rubric 0–7 | 7 | 25% |
| Section II: Long essay · 40 min · 15% | ||
| Long essay (LEQ) · Rubric 0–6 | 6 | 15% |
Estimated cutoffs
Estimated cutoffs from Fiveable's published chart (2027), not College Board — we found no official College Board chart for this exam. Source: Fiveable's APUSH score calculator (2027), which uses the May 2027 format, on a 100-point composite with College Board's weights. The calculator reads your weighted score against that chart's 0–100 scale.
| AP score | Fiveable composite | Weighted score from |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 75–100 | 74.5% |
| 4 | 62–74 | 61.5% |
| 3 | 49–61 | 48.5% |
| 2 | 34–48 | 33.5% |
| 1 | 0–33 | 0% |
AP United States History score distributions
| Year | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2026 | 14% | 37% | 23% | 18% | 8% |
| May 2025 | 14.2% | 36.2% | 23.3% | 18.4% | 8.0% |
Share of students earning each score, from College Board's AP United States History score distributions. 516,738 students took the exam in May 2025. The May 2026 figures are College Board's rounded whole percentages.