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A worked DBQ example, scored row by row

Here is a real-shaped mid-range response scored the way the grader scores it. The essay below is competent and would feel fine to write under time pressure, which is why it repays a close read. It loses three points without ever looking like a bad essay.

Prompt: Evaluate the extent to which the Second Great Awakening changed American society in the period from 1800 to 1860. (Seven documents provided.)

Scored 4 / 7

Thesis / claim1 / 1

"Changed American society a great deal by starting many reform movements" is historically defensible and previews a line of reasoning. It is thin, but it takes a position and the rubric only asks for that.

Contextualization0 / 1

Nothing before or around 1800 is established. The essay starts inside the revivals. One or two sentences on Enlightenment rationalism and the post-Revolution decline in church membership that the Awakening reacted against would earn this point outright. It is the cheapest point on the whole rubric, and the one most often skipped.

Evidence2 / 3

Four documents are cited and used to support the argument, so both document points are secure. The outside evidence point is not: every fact in the paragraph comes from the packet. Name one thing outside the packet and you recover it. The Burned-over District, the Mormon migration, Dorothea Dix and asylum reform all work.

Analysis and reasoning1 / 2

No document is sourced: the essay never says why Garrison or Finney argued what they argued, or who they were speaking to. Three sourced documents earn the first analysis point. Complexity is also absent. The essay only argues change, and never touches the continuity side (the Awakening also reinforced existing gender and racial hierarchies), which is what the last point rewards.

The one fix worth making first

Two of the three lost points, contextualization and sourcing, cost roughly four sentences between them and require no extra content knowledge. That ordering is what the grader's revision list gives you: the cheap structural points first, the argument-level complexity point last.

Grade your DBQ free to see the same breakdown on your own draft.

Sourcing: the DBQ point most drafts miss

Sourcing is the point the essay above loses, and it is the one most likely to be missing from a DBQ that otherwise reads well, partly because it is the only row that asks for something a strong writer would not do naturally. It is also the most mechanical to fix. The rubric asks you to explain, for at least three documents, why the source's situation makes the document say what it says. One clause per document is enough.

Point of view

Who wrote it, and what about their position shapes the claim. "As a mill owner whose profits depended on a long working day, Lawrence describes the twelve-hour shift as generous."

Purpose

What the author was trying to make happen. "Because the pamphlet was written to recruit settlers, it emphasizes the abundance of land and omits conflict with the Osage."

Historical situation

What was going on when it was written that explains the tone. "Written three months after the Panic of 1873, the editorial treats railroad speculation as a moral failing rather than a business risk."

Audience

Who it was addressed to, and how that changes what gets said. "Addressed to a congregation rather than to Congress, the sermon argues from scripture instead of from constitutional precedent."

You need three of these across the essay, and they can be one clause each, appended to the sentence where you already cite the document. Naming the category without a consequence does not count: "Doc 4 is biased" earns nothing, because it never says what the bias does to the evidence.