Test your knowledge of European history -- and gain some college credit in the process -- with the AP European History Exam.
About the Exam
The three-hour-and-five-minute exam includes a 55-minute multiple-choice section and a 130-minute free-response section.
Section I: Multiple-Choice
The 80 multiple-choice questions cover European history from the High Renaissance to the present. About half of the questions cover the period from 1450 to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, with the second half covering the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era to the present. Though many questions require you to be familiar with more than one chronological period or theme, for the most part, the subject breakdown is:
- Cultural and intellectual themes -- about one–third
- Political and diplomatic themes -- about one–third
- Social and economic themes -- about one–third
Unlike other multiple-choice tests, random guessing can hurt your final score. While you don't lose anything for leaving a question blank, one quarter of a point is subtracted for each incorrect answer on the test. But if you have some knowledge of the question and can eliminate one or more answers, it's usually to your advantage to choose what you believe is the best answer from the remaining choices.
Section II: Free-Response
There are three free-response questions. The section begins with a mandatory 15-minute reading period. Spend the reading period analyzing the documents for the document-based question (DBQ) and reviewing the thematic essay questions. Then you'll have 45 minutes to answer the DBQ, and 70 minutes to answer two thematic essay questions. The DBQ essay is worth 45 percent of the free-response score; the two thematic essays together contribute 55 percent of the free-response score.
Some essay questions require that you organize your responses chronologically (e.g. by year, half-centuries, centuries, events, or movements), while others will ask you to make comparisons across centuries. The time period specified by an essay question will depend on the particular topic. It's important that you pay attention to the time period. Your final grade will, in part, depend on the accuracy of the essays' chronological coverage.
Also remember to pay close attention to the directive words in the essay questions. Ignoring directives will result in a lower exam score. The following directives may be included:
- Analyze: determine the component parts; examine their nature and relationship. "Analyze the major social and technological changes that took place in European warfare between 1789 and 1871."
- Assess/evaluate: judge the value or character of something; appraise; evaluate the positive points and the negative ones; give an opinion regarding the value of; discuss the advantages and disadvantages of. "'Luther was both a revolutionary and a conservative.' Evaluate this statement with respect to Luther's responses to the political and social questions of his day."
- Compare: examine for the purpose of noting similarities and differences. "Compare the rise to power of fascism in Italy and in Germany."
- Contrast: examine in order to show dissimilarities or points of difference. "Contrast the ways in which European skilled artisans of the mid-eighteenth century and European factory workers of the late nineteenth century differed in their work behavior and in their attitudes toward work."
- Describe: give an account of; tell about; give a word picture of. "Describe and analyze how overseas expansion by European states affected global trade and international relations from 1600 to 1715."
- Discuss: talk over; write about; consider or examine by argument or from various points of view; debate; present the different sides of. "Discuss the extent to which nineteenth-century Romanticism was or was not a conservative cultural and intellectual movement."
- Explain: make clear or plain; make clear the causes or reasons for; make known in detail; tell the meaning of. "Explain how economic, political, and religious factors promoted European explorations from about 1450 to about 1525."
- Identify: cite specific events, phenomena, and show a connection. "Identify the social and economic factors in preindustrial England that explain why England was the first country to industrialize."
In this part of the test, you will be expected to demonstrate your ability to analyze documents and to write an essay based on those documents. Your goal: a unified essay that clearly analyzes a majority of the 10 to 12 documents provided and that responds directly to all parts of the question that is asked. The documents are chosen both for the information they convey about the topic and for the perspective they offer on the other documents that are provided. Read all the documents with care before formulating your DBQ essay and refer to at least a majority of them in your essay. Depending on the topic and focus of a particular DBQ, the question may or may not require you to discuss change over time. You may include accurate and relevant historical information not included in the documents, but you do not have to do so to achieve a top score.
Document-based questions usually begin with a short passage describing the historical background of the documents. This can be helpful to remind you of the context of the question, but you should not quote extensively from it. It is not considered a document. Documents are numbered and the author and source are provided for each document. You should make appropriate interpretative use of this information within your essay. Throughout your essay, you may show that you are referencing a document by identifying its number in parentheses, e.g., (Doc. 1). There are no irrelevant or deliberately misleading documents.
Readers will look for a crucial historian’s skill when scoring the DBQ: Your awareness that documents are not statements of facts, but are instead descriptions, interpretations, or opinions of events and developments made by particular people at particular places and times, and for specific reasons. Apply critical thinking skills to the documents; assess their reliability and the ways in which they reveal authors' points of view (POV). The author and source are provided for each document. You should make appropriate interpretative use of this information within your essay.
In addition, you must group or juxtapose (to place side by side, especially for contrast or comparison) documents in a variety of ways (e.g., according to their ideas or points of view); suggest reasons for similarities or differences in perspective among the documents; and identify possible biases or inconsistencies within or between documents. Pay attention to the tone of each document as well as to the identifications of authors, the documents' purpose or intended audience, and the date when each document was written.
A DBQ essay should include the following:
THESIS: Your essay should have a clear thesis that responds to all parts of the question and is based on the documents.
MAJORITY OF DOCUMENTS: Correct interpretation of a majority of the documents and use of these documents to support the argument in the thesis.
GROUPING: Your analysis will be revealed by grouping the documents in at least THREE different ways that relate to the question. Each group will consist of at least two documents that you will discuss within a single paragraph. When you go on to a new group, make sure you start a new paragraph by indenting or skipping a line. You may use a document more than once for grouping if you like.
POINT OF VIEW: Another skill you must demonstrate is an assessment of the bias or point of view (POV) represented in the documents; in other words, why is this specific author making this particular statement? Here you should consider the following: in what way(s) does the class, nationality, gender, official position, ideology, or other characteristic of the author influence his or her thinking on the topic at hand? How does the type of document (e.g., public speech, private letter or diary, government report) affect its purpose and content? You need to give at least THREE good examples of POV in your DBQ essay.
A Closer Look at POV in the 2008 Exam
RESPOND TO THE QUESTION. Make sure that your DBQ provides a clear response to all parts of the question.
Here are the specific instructions for the Document-Based Question (DBQ):
Write an essay that:
- Provides an appropriate, explicitly stated thesis that directly addresses all parts of the question and does NOT simply restate the question.
- Discusses a majority of the documents individually and specifically.
- Demonstrates understanding of the basic meaning of a majority of the documents.
- Supports the thesis with appropriate interpretations of a majority of the documents.
- Analyzes the documents by explicitly grouping them in at least three appropriate ways.
- Takes into account both the sources of the documents and the authors’ points of view.
You may refer to relevant historical information not mentioned in the documents.
Thematic Essay QuestionsFinally, you'll demonstrate your mastery of a range of skills and information through two thematic essays. For each, you'll have a choice of three questions. It's recommended that you spend five minutes planning and thirty minutes writing each essay.
The thematic questions are grouped to ensure that you consider a range of historical periods and approaches. The criteria for grouping the thematic essays will change for each examination to ensure coverage; grouping is often not chronological.
Scoring the Exam
The multiple-choice and free-response sections are each worth half of the final exam grade.
