Long Essay Question (LEQ)

This guide organizes advice from past students who got 4s and 5s on their exams. We hope it gives you some new ideas and tools for your study sessions. But remember, everyone's different—what works for one student might not work for you. If you've got a study method that's doing the trick, stick with it. Think of this as extra help, not a must-do overhaul.

📌 Overview

• 15% of Exam Score
• Recommended you spend 40 minutes on the LEQ
• Scored on a 6 point rubric
  • Thesis/Claim (1)
  • Contextualization (1)
  • Uses Specific Evidence (2)
  • Complexity (2)

💭 General Advice

Tips on mindset, strategy, structure, time management, and any other high level things to know

• Imagine that it just so happens that your AP reader happens to be grading their last set of LEQs for the day, which includes yours! Your AP reader is going to be pretty excited/ready to leave after a long day of grading, so make it easier for them by being simple and straight to the point, while still nailing everything on the scoring guide. AP readers get a little under 5 minutes to read your LEQ. In other words, remember that it’s not so much about how you write (even though you should try to be at least a little sophisticated), but the content and what you write!
• In regards to structure, let your thesis be your outline. If you’re able to create a whole outline-do it. However, if you’re short on time or just need some more time to finalize what details to use to support your argument, make sure your thesis isn’t too specific and restrictive. Give yourself some leeway to further develop your reasoning in your essay.
• Trust yourself! You spent all year learning so many different events in history. Come prepared with some examples from various time periods, so if the need calls for it, you have something to fall back on.
• Remember that the AP graders reward you for what you do- they don’t penalize you for what you don’t do. Think about writing these essays as you earn points for everything you do. Be positive about it.
• Before the exam, make sure you have a plan on how to approach the essay! Being prepared is being smart, and being prepared means you can be confident!
• The more confident and relaxed you are during this part, the better you will write. Take a deep breath and let your words flow. You are not given a lot of time, so make sure to stay focused during the entirety of this part of the exam. This is not AP Lit; you need to write well but flowery language is not required and will waste your time.
• Give yourself at least a month to fully study for the AP US History exam because it allows you to study for a couple minutes every day to feel fully prepared for the test. The month-long study technique helps your brain digest every concept and historical events to use for the LEQ and doesn’t overwhelm you when studying for this long test.
• Take many practice tests! They are so helpful and they help you practice the writing style and format before the test. You can time yourself taking the tests and it’ll better prepare you for exam day. LEQs are hard to write, but just know to use helpful pieces of evidence to help write your LEQ.
• To write an LEQ, ask your teacher for help and any pieces of advice they have. They have possibly experience grading LEQs and can help you.
• Your opening paragraph should embody compositional balance by succinctly presenting the context, evidence, and qualifier in a seamless manner. Start with a brief introduction that sets the stage for your argument. Then provide contextual information that highlights the conditions relevant to your argument. Next provide a qualifier that reflects the strength of the change as your claim. Finally, provide evidence that highlights the changes or correlations relevant to your argument. This establishes a clear trajectory for your essay, guiding the reader through the logical progression of your analysis.

🕐 Before you Write

What should a student do in the first few minutes, before they start writing?

Analyze the prompt. Determine the “Ws” of the prompt. What is the period, who is involved, What is the issue, why is it important? Use that information to develop a thesis statement.

• Generally, you’ll want to make an outline quickly but with enough information to guide you on how you want to write. This step is crucial not only for creating a roadmap of your essay, but for giving you an opportunity to think through what you want to say before you start writing. A good way to outline is to write it out like this:
  • Introduction
    • Lead-in/hook/intro information
    • Whatever explanation is necessary to connect the thesis to your intro
    • THESIS!
  • Body Paragraph 1: (Topic)
    • Piece of Evidence 1
      • Short note about the important information and context
      • Short note about what it means
      • Short note about linking it back to thesis
  • Body Paragraph 2: (Topic)
    • Piece of Evidence 2
      • Short note about the important information and context
      • Short note about what it means
      • Short note about linking it back to thesis
  • Body Paragraph 3: (Topic)
    • Piece of Evidence 3
      • Short note about the important information and context
      • Short note about what it means
      • Short note about linking it back to thesis
  • Body Paragraph 4: (Topic) [IF NEEDED]
    • Piece of Evidence 4
      • Short note about the important information and context
      • Short note about what it means
      • Short note about linking it back to thesis
  • Conclusion:
    • Reiterating the thesis and what is so important about it
    • Connecting it to other world events/time periods (contextualization and complexity!)
    • Final call to action/statement
  • You can play with this format as needed, but this is a great general structure for outlining an LEQ!
• Forever and always you should identify exactly what the question is asking you to do. It helps to bullet point your main thoughts, and then turn your bullet points into a broad thesis. Your thesis will guide your entire essay, and all your topic sentences should go directly back to the line of reasoning in your thesis. Use this to keep yourself organized.
• When more content is expected it can be easier to accidentally go on a tangent/pull away from the original prompt to try and maximize knowledge demonstration. Creating an in depth outline can help ensure that your response has direction.
• You need to make sure before you invest time writing that you know enough evidence to analyze the thesis you want. If you don’t know enough, modify your thesis or choose an LEQ about a period you remember better.
• The common introduction-body paragraphs-conclusion outline may lead you to write all three sections in chronological order. While that would be the best choice for paper and pen testing, it is encouraged that you begin outlining your thesis along with pieces of evidence (+ commentary and reasoning) and saving your introduction and conclusion for the last parts to write for your essay. This strategy would definitely be more comfortable for those taking the digital version of the test; however, it’s not impossible for pen and paper students to implement this strategy as well.

🤔 Choosing which Question to Answer

• You can often knock this step out during your outlining process. You can make a very short outline of what evidence you can use for each prompt, what you would want to say, and then analyze which prompt has given you the most material/has the most information you feel confident about. Once you’ve done that, you can much more comfortably choose your question and write out the corresponding outline.
• Read through each question- don’t spend too much time on any of them. Honestly go with your gut. Answer the question that is “easiest” to you. Don’t pick a “harder” one because you think it will be more impressive. You’re in a time crunch- write about the question you can most effectively answer. Choosing the “easier” one also gives you room to go in depth and be sophisticated- which in general can help your score.
• If you are stuck and none of them seem easy, go through each question and bullet point 3 main ideas you could use to answer it. Thinking about it that way may help you if you’re overwhelmed. Pick whichever one you can most completely answer. If all else fails, write a mediocre thesis point for each one- something is better than nothing!
• To choose which question to answer can be hard, but what you can do is understand what period each question is asking. The knowledge of the known period helps you determine what you feel most confident in. Whatever period of US History you feel most comfortable with and the LEQ asks the question of that period, choose that question.

💡 Tips for Earning Each Point

Claim/Thesis

• Before the exam, understand the key kinds of questions they can ask you, and have a plan on how you approach them.
• There are three types of prompts: causation, continuity and change over time (CCOT), and comparison. In your thesis for the second two, use the words! For CCOT, you must say continuity and change. For comparison, you must say similarity and difference. Do not get fancy, your grader wants clarity, not fluff!
• Think about your evidence before you write your thesis statement so you can tailor the supporting commentary with the evidence that you already have in mind.
• As soon as you get your prompt, immediately underline key words, phrases, and dates. Every LEQ will follow some variation of:
  • Evaluate the extent (small, moderate, or large)
  • Evaluate the relative importance (rank the causes)
• To the side or on a scratch piece of paper, create a T-Chart or a bulleted list of key pieces of evidence that you will use (since it’s a LEQ, you must pull evidence from memory for the entire essay!). Depending on how much evidence you have for each side, it will help you determine which position you’ll take.
• Always use the language of the prompt! In other words, rephrase the question and frame it in a way that suits the position you’re taking. Your position should be stated very clearly.
• Your thesis serves as a roadmap for your LEQ, so make sure that you provide a line of reasoning. You can simply do this by adding “because/due to + _________”
  • Feel free to add nuance in your thesis, by following the “although _______, __________” method.
    • While X ( counter argument), ultimately Y and Z (argument).
• Your thesis statement should be your answer to the question. It really is as simple as that- make sure everything you write in the essay supports whatever you write here. If you end up drifting, or thinking of a better statement to support, go back and adjust the thesis statement as necessary.
• Pick strong pieces of evidence that you know you feel confident writing about!

Contextualization

• Your contextualization should be a backstory of events related to your claim & tells the reader you know where you are in history! Do not just list “things that happened”, but make sure that it connects and flows with the content of your LEQ.
• Contextualization should not go farther than 50-60 years prior to events listed in question.
• WRITE A BRIDGE SENTENCE!! This is something that connects your “contextualization” directly to the claim. (Not necessary, but strengthens your LEQ)
• Be more direct and obvious than you think you have to be. The readers want to know what you know, and won’t make assumptions even though they could.
• Try to cite specific events with an emphasis on context relevant to the prompt or the claims you’re going to make in your essay.
• Use a ladder approach. Start with the first rung, furthest past/earliest event, then the middle event, and lastly the event immediately before the prompt. Use specific evidence or you won’t get the point! But don’t forget, any evidence mentioned in the context cannot be repeated as outside evidence later.
• First, look at all the context clues given in the prompt (time, place, era, location, who, etc…). Take these context clues and then talk about what happened before this era or during this era for contextualization. For example, if the thesis had the date 1940’s and talked about social, political, and economic factors, you’d write the contextualization on what happened during the 20’s or during WW1. Make sure to address the who, what, when, and where in your contextualization.

Using Specific Evidence

• When writing “be specific as possible and as general as necessary”. This means if you remember the specific act or amendment cite it! If not, write as many details as you can.
• Whenever possible, throw in dates, names, events to meet the specific evidence component. Instead of stating that “much change occurred during the Progressive Era,” for example, state that “political change occurred when the 17th amendment allowed for the direct election of senators.” The difference goes from generic to specific!
• Try picking only 1-2 specific examples of events per paragraph and milking those to support my greater claim. Before the exam, spend some time making sure you have a tool belt of different events that you can use in different ways. You’ll want to clearly state what you’re referring to at least once, and then describe and apply from there.
• Finding evidence for your question can be difficult, but as long as you study every time period and know a couple general events from each, it will help you answer the prompt fully. Study the subject by knowing general events and with your general knowledge, you can answer the prompt and get your points for evidence.

Complexity

• Like in other AP exams, you can score a 4 or a 5 without this point honestly. If you feel confident and want to go for it, it helps to build the complexity into your overall thesis statement. Begin it with words such as “although,” or “while,” to create the possibility for a different perspective into your main statement. Then, spend a paragraph exploring this exception you have identified using “while” or “although.” It helps the AP readers see that you see different lenses and layers to a bigger idea, which is a big idea of sophistication.
• Additionally remember you can earn the complexity point by highlighting similarities and differences or continuity and change. This could mean relating your thesis to other time periods or historical situations.
• Another way to earn the complexity point is to explain how a different historical group was impacted or reacted to the events you used as evidence.
• You could also earn the complexity point is explaining the reasoning (e.g. explaining why the change happened or why was x similar/different to y).
• If you try to integrate actually everything you remember about the topic you’re writing about, it usually falls into place that you’re writing about more than one perspective or development. Incorporating the modern day also looks really good, and so does a counter-argument paragraph with rebuttal, but if you’re running low on time for extra paragraphs, just try to incorporate as much well-phrased info as you can – pack in your essay with information, like the meat of a burger.