The Bluebook tools worth practicing, and the ones to ignore

Bluebook is the app the digital SAT runs in, and it has a toolbar. Students who have taken a practice test in it have seen the icons; very few have practiced using them, and a few of them change how you should take the test. Here is the full list as College Board names them, sorted by whether I would spend practice time on each.

Three that change how you take the test

Mark for Review. A bookmark icon on every question. Click it and the question is flagged. On its own that is nothing. Combined with the next tool it is the basis of the only pacing strategy I teach.

Question Menu. At the bottom of the screen, the question number opens a grid of every question in the module, showing which are answered, which are blank and which are marked. Click any of them to jump there. Within a module you can move freely; once the module ends you cannot go back.

Together these make a two-pass module possible. First pass: answer what you can answer quickly, put a guess in anything that is going to take more than about ninety seconds, mark it, and move on. Second pass: open the menu, go back to the marked ones in whatever order you like, with the time you have left and a clear picture of how much that is. The student who does not do this spends four minutes on question 9, discovers at the end that questions 20 through 22 were the easy ones, and guesses them. That pattern is the most expensive thing in my timing logs.

Practice it on every module of every practice test until it is a reflex. It is worth more than any content review.

Testing Timer. The countdown at the top of the screen. You can hide it, and it reappears on its own with five minutes left. Whether to hide it is a personal call: some students pace better without the number in front of them, some pace worse. Try a module each way on a practice test and look at which one produced fewer rushed misses at the end. Whatever you decide, decide it before test day, not during.

Two worth a few minutes each

Option Eliminator. Turns on a small cross-out button beside each answer choice. On Reading and Writing it is worth using on every question where you can rule out two choices and are deciding between the other two, because the crossed-out ones stop pulling at your eye. It has an undo. On math I rarely use it. Turn it on at the start of the Reading and Writing section and leave it on.

Reference Sheet. On every math question there is a button that opens the formula sheet. Open it once in practice and learn what is on it, so you never waste time looking for something that is not there. It has: area and circumference of a circle, area of a rectangle and a triangle, the Pythagorean theorem, the two special right triangles, volumes of a box, cylinder, sphere, cone and pyramid, the number of degrees in a circle, the number of radians in a circle, and the sum of a triangle’s angles. It does not have: the quadratic formula, the slope formula, the distance or midpoint formula, exponent rules, the vertex of a parabola, or anything about statistics. Those you know or you do not.

Four you can mostly leave alone

Calculator. This one is not on the leave-alone list because it does not matter. It is there because it needs its own posts, and it has them: where Desmos wins and when to put it down. The one Bluebook-specific thing to know is that the calculator panel can be dragged and resized, and it is worth making it bigger than the default on a laptop so the gray dots are easy to click.

Highlights & Notes. On Reading and Writing questions you can highlight text and attach a note. Some students find highlighting the claim sentence in a command-of-evidence question useful. Most find it slower than reading carefully. Try it on one practice module; if it did not help, drop it. It is not available on math.

Line Reader. Masks everything but the line you are reading. Useful for a student who loses their place in a passage; otherwise unnecessary.

Zoom. Keyboard shortcuts on a laptop, pinch on a tablet. Worth knowing exists for a graph or a table with small print, not worth practicing.

What is not a tool but matters more

The directions. Every section has a Directions button, and the math one holds the rules for the questions with no choices, which are worth reading once and remembering. Nobody reads them on test day. Read them on a practice day.

And the practice tests themselves. Bluebook has full-length official tests built in, free, and every tool above behaves exactly as it will on test day. The way to learn the toolbar is not a video about the toolbar. It is one timed module, using Mark for Review and the Question Menu on purpose, with the eliminator on, and the reference sheet open once to see what is there. After that the tools disappear into the background, which is where they belong.