Pat

Practice, Practice, Practice.... until you achieve the best technique and timing. Spend few hours a day, over period of time you will see how much you improved.

Spend time with as many examples as you can. Also, this may sound bizarre, but try visualizing things in the real world different. Imagine what the room you're sitting in would look like if it were a mirror image. What if you were sitting on the other side of the room? What if it was upside down? You want to practice flipping stuff all over the place in your mind. The better you can manipulate and visualize images in your mind, the better you'll be.

The angle ranking was pretty brutal. Although I wouldn't recommend the book for much else, the Barron's DAT book has some really tough angles that are very close. The morning of the DAT, I woke up and went through all those angles a couple more times. This seemed to work pretty well, even though the resolutions on the Sylvan center computers was funkified.

Also, I put this in another thread in the pre-dental section, but it's been suggested that visually intense 3D video games can help. Use this advice at your discretion, though - don't get too sucked in. I've been a gamer since I was a kid and the visualizations in the PAT section always came easily to me.

The bottom line is - practice like crazy. Practice every day. Nothing will replace practice. Even though other people will say that the tests you see in Kaplan or TopScore are easier than the real PAT, they're far better than nothing.

Awuah29 said:

Hey guys
How can you improve on the PAT part? What approch do I have to take, because I struggle with the time. I run of time for each practice. Is it good when studying for the DAT ( PAT section) to take your time and identify the right answer and speed will eventually come with the time?
Need help
thanks

Click to expand...

You should probably bump your old thread up. It had a lot of useful info in it and would be more useful to others when combined in one thread.

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=114993

But to answer your questions, there is no doubt you need to continue to practice as previous posters have stated. In terms of timing, if you have a long time before your DAT, I'd recommend not worrying too much about timing right now and go for understanding. Make sure you understand why an answer is the way it is and why other choices are wrong. With the understanding of the material, you will naturally get faster in this section over time. If time is not on your side (as in you'll be taking the exam in May), then you have to just go faster and make sure you finish the section. In fact, it is very important you get to the end or as close to answering all the questions as possible (you of course will have an answer marked for every question).

Most everyone struggles with the timing, especially when they are new to the material. The PAT would actually be very easy if you didn't have a time limit. So you'll just need to pace yourself accordingly to get to the end. If you practice long enough and methodically enough, you will get faster and better.

So my question to you is: Have you tried some of the advice given in the other thread? And if so, have you found anything useful or not useful? I thought there was a lot of good advice in there, some of which I wish I had knew of before I took the DAT.