DAT FINALLY DONE!!! Breakdown of test...

6/15/10

Finally... the DAT is done. Here are my scores:

PAT: 22 (93.8%)
QR: 21 (97.6%)
RC: 21 (88.9%)
Bio: 19 (83.5%)
Gen Chem: 21 (91.6%)
Orgo: 19 (75.7%)

TS: 19 (82.8%)
AA:20 (93.4%)

----Breakdown----

-Materials-

• Kaplan Blue Book newest edition (Amazon - $50)
• Schaum's Outline of Biology (Amazon - $6)
• Campbell's Biology Textbook (from high school AP Bio)
• Barron's DAT (Amazon - $20) ***CAUTION*** this book has a TON of errors in all four of their practice tests. I probably found close to a dozen in a couple of them.
• Organic Chemistry notes from class
• Crack DAT Royal Flush Edition ($390 - Crack DAT website)

Crack DAT PAT 10 Tests, 2500 angle rankings, cubes,....
Crack DAT Math 25 Tests
Crack DAT Reading 10 Tests
Crack DAT Science 10 Tests

-Study Schedule-

I began studying for the DAT May 3rd (week after school got out) and worked Mon-Thur 9am-noon all six weeks (I am not much of a morning person, so this help me get up and going for the day... and paid for my study materials). The first 3 weeks, I studied from about 1pm-5pm Monday through Friday and the last 3 weeks I studied from 1pm-anywhere between 6 and midnight everyday of the week. During the last week though, I studied from 1-11 taking breaks just for dinner and going to the bathroom. When I initially wrote out my schedule of what I was going to be focusing on each day, I did not have any of the Crack DAT software. After about a week and a half of going over all the PAT material from Kaplan and Barron's, I decided that I needed more practice. Even though the Crack DAT software was pretty expensive (but still less than the actual Kaplan course), it really let me set up a very structured schedule. From then on, I did a CDM test everyday, two CDP tests a week, and two CDR tests a week. I found that the Crack DAT science was insanely hard and stopped using it after the first test. On top of those, I also did a Barron's or Kaplan comprehensive test every Friday or Saturday. I also split up what I was going to focus my actual studying on every week as well. Out of the six weeks that I had, I spent the first week and a half learning how to do the PAT section. The rest of that week, I read up on different reading comprehension strategies because I have never been great at rc. The next week, I focused on the QR section. For this part, I made note cards using both the Kaplan and the Barron's DAT books, and then went through them. The next week and a half, I focused on General Chemistry, and again only used Kaplan and Barron's. I took 4 days longer than I wanted to on this section though because making note cards took a lot longer than expected. Every so often after that week though, I would go over my note cards if I had any free time. Because Gen Chem took me 4 days longer that I had anticipated, I used the next week and a half studying both Orgo. and Bio. This was probably the biggest mistake I made (and it shows because they are my two lowest scores). I just assumed that since I am a Biomedical Sciences major, just finished up with Orgo II, and got a 5 on my AP biology exam in high school, that I would be fine. I should have spent an ample amount of time studying for those as well. If I could redo studying for those portions, I would definitely have done all of the chapter quizzes from the Campbell's Biology CD that came with the book. Each quiz is 35-50 questions and the CD has one for each of the 55 chapters. Other than that though, I felt like everything else went fine for studying.

-Crack DAT Scores-

CDP: 20,25,22,21,25,29,25,23,25,25

CDR: 18,18,20,21,19,23,21,21,23,21

CDM: 19,19,19,18,22,21,24,22,20, 20,24,23,
23,21,24,22,30,24,24,25,25,29,28,28,30

-The Actual Test-

Biology (19): After finding out that Crack DAT Science was completely a waste, I kind of exhausted all my resources. In my practice exams, I felt that both Barron's and Kaplan were slightly harder (I got 18's in both). Instead of doing a lot of practice problems, I decided to just study for this section. I read the entire Schaum's Outline of Biology cover to cover within one week. After that, I got out my Campbell's biology textbook from AP biology and went over all my highlighting (page by page) from when I took the course (4 days including the day before the exam). If I would have originally planned on going over Campbell's Biology, I would In comparison to the Kaplan and Barron practice exams, I found the actual DAT to be slightly easier. The practice tests tended to be much more straight forward with their questions and it was more of a test of whether you memorized that piece of information or not. On the actual test though, I felt like I could at least narrow down all of the questions that I felt unsure of to two, maybe three answers. There was only 2 questions on the test where I had no idea. Another thing that I noticed was that some of the practice questions during the DAT tutorial were extremely similar to real questions of the test. For example, the practice reading comprehension article had information in it to answer one of the biology questions. I would highly recommend spending those 15 minutes and answering the practice questions. Anyways, it warms your brain up and gets things going.

General Chemistry (21): Again, since Crack Science was no good, I resorted to the comprehensive tests that I took and also the note cards that I made. In comparison to the practice tests, this part was much easier on the real thing. I was getting 16-18 on the practice tests and was really stressing out about how to get my score up. I finally just kind of gave up at doing practice problems for gen chem and started to just look over my note cards every day. On the actual exam, the nicest part was that all of the "calculation" questions (pv=nRT, p1v1=p2v2, etc...) had no calculation portion to it. All the answers were just the equations rearranged with the values given in the question. It was basically what you would put into your calculator before pressing enter to solve for the unknown.

Organic Chemistry (19): This was the score I was the most disappointed in. After earning an A in both Orgo I and II, I thought that this part of the test was going to be a breeze. On my practice exams, I was scoring between a 21-23 every time. On the test, to me it seemed like there were a lot more multi-step reactions than all of the practice tests. Along with those reactions were also a few reagents that I haven't seen before, so that made things a little bit tougher as well. Other than the multi-step reactions, everything was what I expected it to be. Basically, just go through your Orgo text book / class notes, and that will be an ample amount of study material. I would not recommend Kaplan or Barron's for this part of the DAT though. Both books were lacking in different areas.

Perceptual Abilities (22): Crack DAT PAT is a MUST for this section!!!!! I don't know what I would have done without it. Questions were very similar and even the screen set-up and color scheme matched the actual DAT test.

• Keyholes: I found this to be the hardest part on the actual test. In CDP, I would very rarely get one of these questions wrong. On the real test though, some of the shapes were very hard to figure out. I don't know whether it was the way they were drawn, but a few of them definitely looked like they could have had more than one answer.
• TFE: This part was the most similar to CDP. The questions on the real exam were all questions that I could see coming from the CDP tests.
• Angles: When I first started CDP, I was averaging only 7 or 8 correct angles every time. After a couple of tests, I then decided that I would do 10-15 minutes of the 2500 bonus angles included in the package before I went to bed every night. In no time I was getting 14/15 and 15/15. On the actual test, the angles were very similar to CDP's, if not a little easier. There were about 10 of them that I could just look at and differentiate between them within 10 seconds, but then the other five were a lot harder. The morning of my exam, I also did 15 minutes of angles before I left my hotel room. When I was practicing them every night, I felt like the more I did, the easier it got.
• Hole Punching: CDP hole punching was very difficult at first, but the more tests you do, the easier it gets (this is why I would recommend the 10 test version over the 5 test version if you have time to do all of them). When compared to the actual DAT, I thought that CDP was a little bit harder. On the test, the grid pattern is slightly different than CDP's. This made some of the folds look really strange. Even though there are no "half-hole" punches on the real exam, the different grid pattern kind of screwed me up at first.
• Cube Counting: This was another section that was different than CDP's. In crack dat, every test had 5 figures that you had to cube count. Each figure also had like 20 or 30 cubes too. On the actual test, there were 6 figures with 10-14 cubes to count. Even though there was one more figure, each one was a lot easier than any of the CDP figures. There was also no illusions either.
• Pattern folding: I found the pattern folding to be easier on the actual DAT than on CDP. The answer choices were a lot more different from each other and none of the folds seemed tricky at all. I would recommend paying attention to the shapes of the patterns and then compare them to the answers. You could eliminate maybe 1 or 2 choices every time just by looking at the larger folds and seeing if they correlated with any of the sides on the answer choices.

Reading Comprehension (21): I was probably most nervous about this section of the test coming into the DAT. I have never been good at reading comprehension... ever, and this is where Crack DAT Reading really helped out. A lot of people would argue that CDR focuses too much on inference and tone questions, but if you ask me, those are always the hardest ones to answer on a test. CDR really got me ready for these types of questions. Another source that was similar to the actual test was the Kaplan practice passages. These were about the same reading difficulty as the real thing and had very similar questions. The only problem is that there wasn't enough of them in the Kaplan blue book. On the DAT, I kind of used a variety of methods. Because I didn't know exactly what to expect, I quickly read through the entire first passage and then went on to answering the questions. While I was going through the questions though, a lot of the search and destroy questions were pretty detailed, so I had to look back at the text to make sure it was exactly what I thought it was. Because I read through the entire first passage though, it took me around 23 minutes to read and answer all of the questions. The next two sections, I did search and destroy for pretty much all of the questions. If I got a tone question, I completely read through the first and last paragraph, and if I couldn't get an answer from that, I would skim the paragraphs in between. I finished answering the last question with a minute left. It was just enough time to go back to two of the 6 or 7 questions that I had marked. Each of the passages were about 12-18 paragraphs long. The more paragraphs though, the shorter each one was.

Quantitative Reasoning (21): Even though a 21 is pretty good for QR (97.6 percentile) I was actually a little disappointed with this section. I felt like after doing a Crack DAT Math exam everyday, I would have the math stuff down perfectly. Towards the end of the practice tests, I was in the high twenties (I was only missing questions from little mistakes). I honestly do not know what happened on the real DAT. I marked three questions and went back and for sure answered 1 of them correctly. In comparison to CDM, I actually felt like the real DAT was easier too. Although almost every question was a story problem, none of them were overly difficult to answer. I felt that CDM adequately prepared me for the math section of the DAT. The video explanations were also extremely helpful. The guy in the video completely ran through how to solve each of the problems.

---Post Test---

Now is where the real fun begins though...

I have one main question for the people that actually read all of this and might know a little bit more about the whole application process than I do, with these scores, a 3.94 gpa, 3.94 science gpa, great letters of rec, lots of volunteering/research/dental observation, do you think I could get into all of these schools? I also go to a public university in Michigan at a fairly reputable school.

Case Western
Boston University
University of Pennsylvania
Tufts
University of Louisville
University of Kentucky
University of Iowa
Marquette
Minnesota
Pittsburgh
Temple


As you can see, I kind of want to go out of state, and was mainly wondering if I had a good shot at a majority of these.


One more last bit of information is that I am actually going into my third year of college once this summer break is done. This means that I will not be applying to dental school until next cycle (so I still have time to retake the DAT if I really should).

Hopefully this helps anyone about to take the DAT test pretty soon.