Help!! Oat study suggestions needed!!!

[MaciA]

Okay so I really need some guidance!!! I've taken the OAT once already and i did not do well at all!!! Since then I have been working and havent had much time to study but now is the time! For the last couple of weeks I have been all over the place with the different materials and I just feel like I'm getting nowhere! I have the crack the oat software and several books from the library but I just can get a good grip! Any suggestions?! I have devoted the next two months to studying...do you guys think this will be enough time? I've thought about chads videos but will I even put a dent in them in 2 months? What do you guys think about the Kaplan courses? Are they worth the money? I know I'm asking a lot of questions but I just feel so lost in my study habits so any help will be highly appreciated! Thanks!!

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[optoapp2012]

Okay so I really need some guidance!!! I've taken the OAT once already and i did not do well at all!!! Since then I have been working and havent had much time to study but now is the time! For the last couple of weeks I have been all over the place with the different materials and I just feel like I'm getting nowhere! I have the crack the oat software and several books from the library but I just can get a good grip! Any suggestions?! I have devoted the next two months to studying...do you guys think this will be enough time? I've thought about chads videos but will I even put a dent in them in 2 months? What do you guys think about the Kaplan courses? Are they worth the money? I know I'm asking a lot of questions but I just feel so lost in my study habits so any help will be highly appreciated! Thanks!!

I took the Kaplan course and I would highly recommend it, although not everyone shares my viewpoint. The real benefit in the Kaplan course is not so much the classroom part - that's minimally helpful. The gems are the hard copy study materials and the online stuff. The only non-Kaplan materials that I used to study were some extra Ochem books, but it was mostly just because a friend had it, not because the Kaplan stuff didn't work. Actually I was sort of minimal on my studying for the Ochem and Physics sections out of the Kaplan materials. In any case, I got a 390 TS / 380 AA....so again, I highly recommend it!! My initial Kaplan test put me at around 290, but that was before I took a lot of the prereq's, which I did over the next couple semesters. So I think the classes certainly were a part of raising my score, however Kaplan was responsible for at least 50 of those points for sure!

Here's exactly what I did for each section with the Kaplan materials:
-Bio: read every Bio chapter in the Lecture Notes book (big brick) multiple times; took the quizzes multiple times (almost weekly, even though they were the same questions over and over); memorized all of the flashcards (and repeatedly went through them throughout studying)...[did NOT use the colored slicks you get with the class] (my final score: 400)
-Chem: read every chem chapter in the Lecture Notes book multiple times; the the quizzes multiple times; memorized all of the flashcards; used the slicks occasionally for reference (my final score: 400)
- Ochem: read all the Ochem chapters in the Lecture Notes book; took all of the quizzes multiple times; memorized a selection of the flashcards (my final score: 350)
- Physics: read some of the chapters in the Lecture Notes book, memorized all the flashcards (my final score: 350)
- Reading: used the method learned in the class and practiced with all of the reading passages in the online materials...[never read any sections in the book on this topic...not even sure there are any] (my final score: 390)
- Quantitative Reasoning: nothing. Did not attend the classroom session for this, did not read chapters in the book...ok I took the online section tests for these to practice. I always got 400's on the practice ones, but then the day of I was just burnt out on that section and did not do so well. In retrospect, I would have spent more time studying this section so that I could have been faster on test day. I ran out of time on test day. (my final score: 360)
- There are 2 Section Tests for each topic - you can only take them one time and I did all of those. I usually took one after covering all the material for a given topic, looked at what areas I was missing most questions in, then went back and studied those materials specifically and took the 2nd Section Test
- There are 5 full-length, timed tests that have the same format as you will see on the real test. You can only take each of them once and you have to take the whole 4 hour thing in a single sitting like it's the real thing. I spaced them out to take one about every week leading up to my exam. I poured over the results and analyzed where I was weak and needed to study more. Once you study Bio, you might get great at it but then forget it when you focus on Physics or something like that. So there is a lot of review on all the topics throughout all of this.

I spent about two months studying with multiple hours on it almost every day. My actual OAT score ended up being around 20-30 points higher than what I was getting on the Kaplan sample tests toward the end of my studying. I thought the reading section was much easier on the real thing - I had all kinds of time left over on the real one but would run out of time every time on the Kaplan ones. The passages on the real thing were easier (1 was hard, 2 were easy). I thought the math section had more multi-step problems than what I saw in the Kaplan materials, which is what slowed me down. But it could've just been my stress level and how anxious I was to just see my score already by that point.

Good luck!

 

[Roffles]

Kaplan's worth it. What the post above me says is pretty much what I'd say too.

 

[balltc]

Okay so I really need some guidance!!! I've taken the OAT once already and i did not do well at all!!! Since then I have been working and havent had much time to study but now is the time! For the last couple of weeks I have been all over the place with the different materials and I just feel like I'm getting nowhere! I have the crack the oat software and several books from the library but I just can get a good grip! Any suggestions?! I have devoted the next two months to studying...do you guys think this will be enough time? I've thought about chads videos but will I even put a dent in them in 2 months? What do you guys think about the Kaplan courses? Are they worth the money? I know I'm asking a lot of questions but I just feel so lost in my study habits so any help will be highly appreciated! Thanks!!

Chad's videos are legit. You can watch them in high speed using windows media player so they are much easier to go through. They key is being consistent in your studying which takes some discipline. Plan on sitting down for a certain amount of time every day. You can set a minimum and then exceed that on days when you're more into the studying.