AP US History practice, built on sources

What the AP US History exam actually looks like

Section I is 55 questions in 55 minutes, and the questions come in sets: two to six questions built around a single source, per College Board’s own sample questions. Almost nothing on the exam is a bare recall question, because the skill being examined is what you can do with a document, not what you can name.

Qinno mirrors that shape directly. A match is five questions on one source, which is why the subject reads so differently from the others here: you spend the first thirty seconds reading, and the rest of the match thinking about the same material from different angles.

The 156 battle questions are organised into 26 source sets, so no two matches end on the same material.

Six questions per source, six historical thinking skills

Each source in the bank carries six questions, one for each of the skills the CED names: identifying and explaining context, comparison, causation, continuity and change, sourcing the author’s point of view, and evaluating an argument. A match draws five of them in ascending difficulty, so the hardest question on that source is always the one that decides the score.

That structure is what stops a source set from turning into six paraphrases of the same question. If two questions can be answered by the same sentence of the source, one of them is not doing its job.

Sources are described, never faked

Qinno’s written stimuli describe a document — its author, date, audience and argument — rather than quoting invented text. Fabricated quotations are the standard failure of homemade history banks, and a misattributed line is worse than no quotation at all: students memorise it.

The description sits inside each question’s own stem rather than floating above the set. That way every question stands alone, which is what makes single-question practice mode and the mistake book work at all.

Maps, charts, posters and photographs — measured against the real exam

It is easy to assume a history bank does not need images. The official practice exam says otherwise: 13 of its 55 questions, about 24%, refer to a graph, map, photograph or poster, with one set of each. Qinno’s bank carries 36 questions with visual sources, about 23%.

Charts and maps are generated by script so they can be corrected and regenerated. Political cartoons, posters and documentary photographs cannot be drawn — those are genuine public-domain images, each one logged with its source and the rule that admits it: published in the United States in 1930 or earlier.

Every wrong option is a specific mistake

The wrong answers are written to be the reading a student actually arrives at: taking the author’s claim at face value when the question asks about its context, choosing the movement that came a generation later, mistaking a cause for an effect, or picking a statement that is historically true but does not follow from this source.

What is banned is the option that can be eliminated on dates alone. If knowing the century is enough to rule out three answers, the question tests calendar reflexes rather than historical reasoning.

What you do with the questions you miss

Every AP US History question you get wrong, in a battle or in practice, lands in your mistake book automatically, with the answer you chose, the correct answer, and an AI explanation that works through the method and names what each wrong option corresponds to.

Mistake practice serves only your own missed questions: answer one correctly and it leaves the rotation, miss it again and it stays. Practice questions are deliberately harder on average than battle questions, because practice is untimed and you can actually work on paper.

Ways to play

• Demo battle — five questions against a scripted opponent, no account needed.
• Bot battle — an opponent that adapts to your recent scores, ten matches a day.
• Live room — share a six-character code and race a friend in real time.
• Challenge link — play your five questions, send the link, and your friend races a replay of your run.

Other subjects

Qinno covers 3 more exams, each built the same way against its own published design.