AP World History Score Calculator

Your multiple-choice total, short-answer points, DBQ score and LEQ score are each scaled to their share of a 130-point composite: 52 for multiple choice, 26 for short answer, 32.5 for the DBQ and 19.5 for the LEQ. Those shares match the exam's 40, 20, 25 and 15 percent weights. They are added and rounded once to give your composite, which the curve then converts to a 1 to 5.

The composite is exact: it uses College Board's published section weights and point values. The 1 to 5 conversion is a projection, because College Board has never released a scoring worksheet for the current exam and only sets cutoffs after each administration. We use a curve from AP-prep sites that agree within a point. A composite within a few points of a cutoff could land on either side.

On the curve used here you need 97 out of 130, which is about 75% of the composite. Because that curve is a projection and College Board resets its real cutoffs every year, a composite in the low 90s or the high 90s is close enough to 97 that you should not count on either a 4 or a 5.

No. On a 130-point composite, 70% is 91 points, and that falls in the 4 band, which runs from 80 to 96 on this curve. A 5 starts at 97, roughly 75%. The general rule that 70% earns a 5 does not hold for this exam, so check your own composite instead of your raw percentage.

A composite of 80 out of 130, about 62% of the total, reaches a 4 on the curve used here. That is a lower bar than most students expect, and a 4 was the most common score College Board reported for the 2025 exam.

There are 55, answered in 55 minutes, and they make up 40% of the exam score. Questions come in sets of three or four that share a single source, such as a passage, image, chart or map. Only correct answers count, so a wrong answer costs nothing more than a blank, and guessing is always better than skipping.

Three, and all three are required. Question 1 gives you a secondary source, question 2 a primary source, and question 3 a primary or secondary non-text source. All cover 1200 to 2001. Each is worth 3 points, so short answer totals 9 raw points and counts for 20% of your exam score.

The DBQ is worth 7 points across four rubric rows: thesis (1), contextualization (1), evidence (up to 3) and analysis and reasoning (up to 2). It counts for 25% of your exam score, which is more than all three short-answer questions together, even though those add up to 9 raw points.

Not the classroom kind. College Board does not grade students against each other. It sets the composite score needed for each AP score after the exam, adjusting for how hard that year's version was, so a 4 means the same thing every year. The multiple-choice section is scored on right answers only, with no penalty for guessing.

For the 2025 exam, College Board reported a mean score of 3.16 across 411,547 test takers, and 64.3% scored a 3 or higher. The mean moves a little each year with the size of the test-taking group and the difficulty of that year's exam.

In 2025, 13.9% of test takers scored a 5. The rest split as 33.4% with a 4, 17.0% with a 3, 26.5% with a 2 and 9.2% with a 1, according to College Board's published distribution. A 4 was the most common result, well ahead of the 5.

The two exams share the same structure, weights and point values, so the composite math is identical. Each has its own page and cutoff table, though, so use the APUSH score calculator for AP US History. This page is set up only for AP World History: Modern.