Bio - I felt that most of the questions on the test weren't that overly hard. I am very glad that I read the cliff's bio book because that has most of the information that you will need to know for the DAT. I personally didn't feel that any of the questions were thaaat random while I was taking the test...some may disagree but In my opinion, and I think someone else on SDN said the same, that there's just such a large range of info and questions that can be pulled from that info. The questions that I probably missed were the ones that I more than likely "marked" on the exam...and, the one's I marked I remember reading over the related info but I guess it just didn't sink in as well.
Chem - now these are the classes that I made 2 C's in when I took them college (probably b/c I hadn't gotten my act together at the time mostly but even still, I wasn't lookin forward to having to relearn it). I felt that my practice tests were harder than the Real DAT. For instance, on the practice test you would have to calculate everthing out. On the DAT it was just setting up the calculations; however; questions related to nuclear chemistry (ex. 1/2 life - which I had a couple on the real exam) had to be calculated out completely. You definitely need to understand the concepts/theories because there's more of those types of questions than there are questions that require you calculate an answer (ex. polarity of a molecule, solubility, which way does the rxn shift when something is done to it). DAT Destroyer is a big, and I repeat, a very very big help... it is harder than the real exam but it'll teach you pretty much everything that you need to know about chemistry questions types and concepts tested on the real DAT...that is if you make sure you don't let the concepts in the DD chem pass you by. There's only so many ways that they can ask a type of question in Gchem. I must have done the DD Chem a good 5-6 times. I would do 50 questions in Gchem everyday once i started doing just practice problems.
Ochem - I didn't study for this as much as I did for Gchem. I've always liked ochem and did well in my college ochem classes so I knew that I could bring myself up to speed on the info easier and faster than Gchem. I Probably would have made a higher score in this section if I wasn't so worried about Gchem but, as you can tell it paid off in the long run anways. Most of the questions on the Real DAT where complete the rxn type questions but only 1 or 2 step rxns. (on Ochem Odyssey you have rxns with 4-5 steps...very good practice though...you'll know it after having to do that enough times). I didn't have any spectroscopy graphs or anything of that sort but did have a couple of questions about spectroscopy (ex. what shift is represented by an aldehyde on NMR, which is 9-10...those sort of questions). You are going to get questions types that ask about thing like acidity of protons and electron withdrawing groups vs. electron donating groups, polarity, solubility, lab techniques. As I said upabove in the materials I used...Ochem Odyssey if your best friend for the Ochem section. I think it's great because you can focus on specific areas of weakness, thereby maximizing your study efforts..at least once you've already been doing a little bit of practice and have taken a practice test or two. Make notes from the questions that you miss...I would literally go over every individual question, especially then ones that I missed. With the questions I missed, I wrote down the rxns and info in a notebook. I would then go through my rxn notes once everyday so that they would stay fresh on my mind.
PAT -
Keyholes - I felt that the keywholes were more "funky" compareed to CD PAT and Kaplan. I got some shapes with non-linear edges and odd looking shapes but probably no more than 5 of those.
For everything else...CD PAT was amazing!!!! CD PAT was very representative to the real DAT for everything, other than that I felt the keywholes weren't as funky on the CD PAT as they were on the real DAT. If you can do the CD PAT and make 20's and above on it...you'll do fine.
RC - I honestly didn't study RC at all. The only time that I did RC was on the practice test when I was being timed. I originally tried the Kaplan method in trying to make 1 or 2 lines summary notes per paragraph on each passage but I found that I just ended up wasting too much time. That's me pesonally though...I'm not a fast reader so, I found that Search and Destroy worked best for me. Some of you guys may be able to read the whole passge quickly and have more than enough time to answer questions..not the case for me. And yes, you can do S&D for RC. That's what I did and I made a 20 on the real DAT (21 was the highest I made on the Kaplan practice test). on my DAT, I felt that most of the questions were just a matter of finding the answer in the passage. 1 of the passages however was definitely more inference/tone based, when compared to the other two passages. But, even on the other 2 passages, that were "find the answer in the passsage" type, did have at least a couple of inference/tone questions.
QR - ugh, my lowest score and the only score that I didn't make a 20 or above
but oh well! Math, not really my strong point. When you have 45 mins to do 40 questions, and they throw in word problems...headache for me lol. Having said that, you have to be able to know when to skip a question and keep going...there WILL be easier questions as you continue through the section. No sense in losing points on those easy questions. If math is a worry for you then I would suggest do the questions that you can do easily as you go through this section. If you can't think of how to do a problem within the first 10 or so seconds when you first look at the question, pick an answer choice & "mark" it (so that you know to come back to it). If you have time at the end, go back through the questions that you marked. Math Destoryer is a very big help and is on par with the level of difficultly that you will encounter on the real DAT.
