My scores were:
21 PAT
20 QR
28 RC (I am a veteran of the LSAT--don't know what else to say but the DAT RC is absurdly easy by comparison)
19 BIO
23 GC
21 OC
20 TS
22 AA
First off, as to the testing experience itself. The security was absolutely no joke. Body scans, fingerprinting, flipping out your pockets--even when you just leave for the break. The ironic thing is, once I got through all that security, no one looked at me again. I could easily have taken my two sheets of laminated construction paper and made a "protractor" on the screen for angle ranking, for example (I didn't!).
The "whiteboards" I was expecting were just laminated plastic sheets with grid lines on one side and blank on the other side. Great for punnet squares and keeping stuff neat, and I was relieved not to have to worry about the little quarter inch elevation of my wrist above the surface of the desk as I wrote. The markers are nice...they really don't smear.
Now to the test itself. Mods, I am taking great pains to write a good and useful review without divulging specific test material; if I cross the line please just edit my post and give me a warning, don't ban me.
PAT: much, much easier than the prep stuff I did (Crack and Bootcamp). Especially angle ranking. ESPECIALLY angle ranking. On almost every question there would be one angle that was just so obviously bigger or smaller than all the rest that it seemed like a joke...and often one or even two of the answer choices would show this obviously huge/small angle in an intermediate position. Made for much easier process of elimination. The answer choices in general seemed to "correlate" much less with what the angles looked like...for example, (this is HYPOTHETICAL) if the correct sequence were 1-2-3-4, and it was easy to see that 1 and 2 were close but both smaller than 3 and 4 which were also close, your answer choices were generally not
2-1-3-4
1-2-3-4
2-1-4-3
1-2-4-3
The incorrect answer choices are not ALL obviously calculated to look attractive the way they are in Bootcamp. There was usually one such wrong answer choice and 2 more obviously wrong ones.
The section that psyched me out the most, funnily enough, was cube counting. Plain old, ordinary cube counting. Unlike in my prep materials, when you click "next" during cube counting, the image momentarily disappears...for just long enough for you to wonder, is that the same set of cubes? So then you waste time going back to double check because the last thing you want to do is put the right number for the previous set of cubes. The images of the cubes were also about double in size compared with what I was used to. And not a single one of my questions asked how many cubes had 5 sides painted. Not one. Keyholes were fairly comparable to the prep materials, except there were a few (2 or 3) just bizarre shaped apertures...like, imagine a 70-sided polygon bizarre. TFE and hole punching were comparable, and pattern folding was slightly easier than prep materials.
QR--absurdly, absurdly easy compared with Bootcamp. I am not joking when I say a well-educated 5th grader could have gotten a 20 on my QR. Lots and lots and lots of conversions of feet to meters to miles, pounds to ounces to tons, minutes to days to seconds, etc. One question listed a small odd number of integers in ascending order and asked for the median. That question was on my screen for less than 5 seconds. No trig more advanced than basic applications of SOH CAH TOA. A few tricky algebra questions (be very comfortable with algebraically isolating x in a denominator), but hey, I didn't say a 5th grader would get a 25 did I?
BIO--if you're gonna have a "throwaway" section, this should be it. I studied more for bio than for any other section of the test, and I did the worst on it. There's just too much material. FFS, the bio textbook is 4 inches thick, with column text to boot! Bootcamp warned me about this, and it was true: no matter how much you study, there will be terms on the Bio section you've just literally never seen or heard before in your life. But then there were also lots of questions on the basics, too...enough that if you know the basics you will be comfortably in high teens territory in this section. For the remaining points, the juice just isn't really worth the squeeze IMO, unless you're a super gunner set on UNC OOS. I took my 19 happily. Especially when compared with:
GC--this is your bread and butter. The number of concepts to be tested here is much, much smaller than in bio. For example, my stack of flash cards for bio was 4 inches thick, and I was still going (i.e., making more) when I decided I just had to call it and start studying other material. My stack of flash cards for GC was 1/2 an inch thick, and that's because there's really only a few things you need to know how to do. On my test I had nothing redox, nothing with logs except "what is the pH in a x.xM solution of HX", and the "calculations", if you can call them that, were very simple. When given a question where I had to calculate something, everything was either multiples of 2 or of 10. Know your gas laws, know electron configurations, know how to make a rate equation given experimental data for each reactant. This section was very, very straightforward.
OC--Ortho-para/meta direction, as well as knowing your activating/deactivating substituents are HUGE. A good number of gimmes like IUPAC naming and identifying hybridization states (at least 3 or 4 on hybridization states alone!), as well as the token "ID the Bronsted Lowry acids and bases" question. Much less "tricky" than I thought overall. Know the major functional groups or you'll be guessing on a few of these questions. As far as memorizing IR spectra, I will repeat Bootcamp's recommendation--just know that ~3200 is OH and ~1700 is carbonyl. That was good enough for me.
RC--as mentioned earlier, I am a veteran of the LSAT, a political science major with a concentration in pre-law who changed his mind about life later. This definitely helped me here. When you first begin, there is a screen with just the passage, and when you click next you're taken to the first question, and you can still read the passage below. Skip that first screen. It's useless and just wastes your time. Go straight to question 1. I used the "read the question first" method. Read question 1 then start reading the passage until you find the answer to question 1. Read question 2 and pick up where you left off in the passage, and proceed in that manner. That will work for about the first half of the questions in each passage before you find yourself poking around for the answers. I didn't study for RC--just relied on my past experience and background there. If you are interested in specific study material, take a look at the LSAT. LSAT RC is brutal compared with DAT RC.
Overall a positive experience.
Special shout out to Ari and Bootcamp! Especially Bootcamp PAT practice.
Boo Crack. Crack the DAT's science has been one of the worst experiences of my life. I bought their whole suite back in June and started messing around with their chemistry and it nearly caused me to have a nervous breakdown. And that's all I have to say about that.
21 PAT
20 QR
28 RC (I am a veteran of the LSAT--don't know what else to say but the DAT RC is absurdly easy by comparison)
19 BIO
23 GC
21 OC
20 TS
22 AA
First off, as to the testing experience itself. The security was absolutely no joke. Body scans, fingerprinting, flipping out your pockets--even when you just leave for the break. The ironic thing is, once I got through all that security, no one looked at me again. I could easily have taken my two sheets of laminated construction paper and made a "protractor" on the screen for angle ranking, for example (I didn't!).
The "whiteboards" I was expecting were just laminated plastic sheets with grid lines on one side and blank on the other side. Great for punnet squares and keeping stuff neat, and I was relieved not to have to worry about the little quarter inch elevation of my wrist above the surface of the desk as I wrote. The markers are nice...they really don't smear.
Now to the test itself. Mods, I am taking great pains to write a good and useful review without divulging specific test material; if I cross the line please just edit my post and give me a warning, don't ban me.
PAT: much, much easier than the prep stuff I did (Crack and Bootcamp). Especially angle ranking. ESPECIALLY angle ranking. On almost every question there would be one angle that was just so obviously bigger or smaller than all the rest that it seemed like a joke...and often one or even two of the answer choices would show this obviously huge/small angle in an intermediate position. Made for much easier process of elimination. The answer choices in general seemed to "correlate" much less with what the angles looked like...for example, (this is HYPOTHETICAL) if the correct sequence were 1-2-3-4, and it was easy to see that 1 and 2 were close but both smaller than 3 and 4 which were also close, your answer choices were generally not
2-1-3-4
1-2-3-4
2-1-4-3
1-2-4-3
The incorrect answer choices are not ALL obviously calculated to look attractive the way they are in Bootcamp. There was usually one such wrong answer choice and 2 more obviously wrong ones.
The section that psyched me out the most, funnily enough, was cube counting. Plain old, ordinary cube counting. Unlike in my prep materials, when you click "next" during cube counting, the image momentarily disappears...for just long enough for you to wonder, is that the same set of cubes? So then you waste time going back to double check because the last thing you want to do is put the right number for the previous set of cubes. The images of the cubes were also about double in size compared with what I was used to. And not a single one of my questions asked how many cubes had 5 sides painted. Not one. Keyholes were fairly comparable to the prep materials, except there were a few (2 or 3) just bizarre shaped apertures...like, imagine a 70-sided polygon bizarre. TFE and hole punching were comparable, and pattern folding was slightly easier than prep materials.
QR--absurdly, absurdly easy compared with Bootcamp. I am not joking when I say a well-educated 5th grader could have gotten a 20 on my QR. Lots and lots and lots of conversions of feet to meters to miles, pounds to ounces to tons, minutes to days to seconds, etc. One question listed a small odd number of integers in ascending order and asked for the median. That question was on my screen for less than 5 seconds. No trig more advanced than basic applications of SOH CAH TOA. A few tricky algebra questions (be very comfortable with algebraically isolating x in a denominator), but hey, I didn't say a 5th grader would get a 25 did I?
BIO--if you're gonna have a "throwaway" section, this should be it. I studied more for bio than for any other section of the test, and I did the worst on it. There's just too much material. FFS, the bio textbook is 4 inches thick, with column text to boot! Bootcamp warned me about this, and it was true: no matter how much you study, there will be terms on the Bio section you've just literally never seen or heard before in your life. But then there were also lots of questions on the basics, too...enough that if you know the basics you will be comfortably in high teens territory in this section. For the remaining points, the juice just isn't really worth the squeeze IMO, unless you're a super gunner set on UNC OOS. I took my 19 happily. Especially when compared with:
GC--this is your bread and butter. The number of concepts to be tested here is much, much smaller than in bio. For example, my stack of flash cards for bio was 4 inches thick, and I was still going (i.e., making more) when I decided I just had to call it and start studying other material. My stack of flash cards for GC was 1/2 an inch thick, and that's because there's really only a few things you need to know how to do. On my test I had nothing redox, nothing with logs except "what is the pH in a x.xM solution of HX", and the "calculations", if you can call them that, were very simple. When given a question where I had to calculate something, everything was either multiples of 2 or of 10. Know your gas laws, know electron configurations, know how to make a rate equation given experimental data for each reactant. This section was very, very straightforward.
OC--Ortho-para/meta direction, as well as knowing your activating/deactivating substituents are HUGE. A good number of gimmes like IUPAC naming and identifying hybridization states (at least 3 or 4 on hybridization states alone!), as well as the token "ID the Bronsted Lowry acids and bases" question. Much less "tricky" than I thought overall. Know the major functional groups or you'll be guessing on a few of these questions. As far as memorizing IR spectra, I will repeat Bootcamp's recommendation--just know that ~3200 is OH and ~1700 is carbonyl. That was good enough for me.
RC--as mentioned earlier, I am a veteran of the LSAT, a political science major with a concentration in pre-law who changed his mind about life later. This definitely helped me here. When you first begin, there is a screen with just the passage, and when you click next you're taken to the first question, and you can still read the passage below. Skip that first screen. It's useless and just wastes your time. Go straight to question 1. I used the "read the question first" method. Read question 1 then start reading the passage until you find the answer to question 1. Read question 2 and pick up where you left off in the passage, and proceed in that manner. That will work for about the first half of the questions in each passage before you find yourself poking around for the answers. I didn't study for RC--just relied on my past experience and background there. If you are interested in specific study material, take a look at the LSAT. LSAT RC is brutal compared with DAT RC.
Overall a positive experience.
Special shout out to Ari and Bootcamp! Especially Bootcamp PAT practice.
Boo Crack. Crack the DAT's science has been one of the worst experiences of my life. I bought their whole suite back in June and started messing around with their chemistry and it nearly caused me to have a nervous breakdown. And that's all I have to say about that.
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