violinist1104
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Hi everyone, I took my DAT recently, and I wanted to do a breakdown of my scores/study strategies in case it’s helpful to anybody! Mine’s kind of untraditional because all kinds of things went wrong in my study process, but I’ll point out how I used my study time.
I owe a lot of credit to my GOD TIER bio wizard of a friend who gave me some personalized crash courses near the end of my studying on test week. That was a heck of a desperate week. We went over big ecology concepts like the causes of changes in allele frequencies like bottleneck, etc.
You can scroll down for the actual breakdown, but here are some general things about my process:
PAT (24) - Y’all, the real PAT got hannnddssss. If you got PAT generators, use the heck out of em. Angle ranking on the real DAT was near impossible.
QR (27) - This kind of math was stuff I had trained for when I did ACT in high school. I was lucky to have had exposure over the years to QR kind of problems. But I still watched all the DATBooster content for QR. Practice that I recommend for this is doing practice problems without the pressure of a clock. If any of you are musicians, you know that when you’re trying to learn a new skill, playing something in the practice room correctly is more important than playing something fast. Take the first steps slow, make sure you think of the correct formula/logic, then once you become more familiar, the speed will come on its own.
RC (22) - This section was tough. The prep that was helpful was highlighting RC practice tests. Once you know what it takes to skim your own notes really well, you’ll be set. If you don’t remember an answer from the passage immediately, good highlights are pretty effective in helping you find your answers.
Biology (26) - Bio started off being my weakest, so I gave this more attention than others. DATBooster practice materials helped so much! I didn’t know very much relevant biology except for the content from school maybe ~1.5 to 2 ish years ago. Feralis + Anki was a nice combo for me, but video tutorials were so much nicer personally because I like having visuals. If it came to it, I would look up content on YouTube to help me clear up confusions. I ended up not having enough time to read ecology notes, so I used the Booster cheat sheet and also asked my friend to sum up some concepts that I got wrong on practice exams. Genetics was something I was familiar with, so I didn’t stress about that as much.
Gen Chem (26) - Booster content!!!
Ochem (27) - Also Booster content! I didn’t do the worksheet for every video, but I did do Anki cards for ochem. If you don’t have good orgo notes from class, especially reaction schemes, make notes on Booster videos! Stuff like this is SUPER helpful when you wanna know ONE reaction like “I forgot what alkyne + BH3 leads to” or something like that. It will save you a lot of time when you’re reviewing. I was very lucky to have good notes + one of the most phenomenal orgo professors to ever exist on the face of the earth, so even though I started off low, I felt good knowing that I had a good toolbox already.
Example of notes I took from Booster ochem videos are in blue, class notes are in black.
More general things:
I owe a lot of credit to my GOD TIER bio wizard of a friend who gave me some personalized crash courses near the end of my studying on test week. That was a heck of a desperate week. We went over big ecology concepts like the causes of changes in allele frequencies like bottleneck, etc.
You can scroll down for the actual breakdown, but here are some general things about my process:
- I started in July with the intention of taking it in October, but I got very behind day by day, so I ended up pushing by a month. I intended to use the DATBooster 10-week schedule.
- One reason I got so behind was because of school, so I never got to enter the review phase of the DATBooster schedule. I ended up extending my learning phase until basically right before the exam.
- I did Anki religiously. In fact, I did it so religiously that I let myself get behind on other content because there were so many Anki cards for taxonomy + plants. I haven’t been exposed to either of them before DAT, so I wanted to learn them all before I moved on. In hindsight, that was unnecessary.
- I read the Ch. 2 Feralis Biology notes and got a bit overwhelmed by the taxonomy + plant stuff. I’m a slow reader and every time I tried to read, I’d sometimes get lost. Doing notes on Feralis biology would have taken an eternity for me, so my strategy was to skim the notes and do Anki flashcards. Even when I originally did read notes, the day later I’d have forgotten most of the info anyway. After doing Anki, I'd skim over again to make sure the cards didn't miss anything.
- However, I will say that notes are nice if you end up needing a cheat-sheet sort of ordeal. They’re especially good for ochem and gen chem on a whim.
- Overall, I think one of my biggest mistakes was stressing so hard over fitting the Booster 10-week schedule so perfectly. Having a schedule is definitely better than winging it, but I’d get so discouraged if I couldn’t finish a day because I had other homework or other activities.
- For a test like this, you’re quite literally never going to know everything. So the best strategy in my opinion is to do as comprehensive of a coverage as possible and cover breadth over depth.
- I took the majority of my practice exams on test week. For my last two bio tests, I asked my friend to sit in to watch me take them. He was a huge help during the last week when I was too scared to take practice exams.
- I only took two actual 2 full-lengths because I felt like some tests wouldn’t be a good use of my time, like for math.
PAT (24) - Y’all, the real PAT got hannnddssss. If you got PAT generators, use the heck out of em. Angle ranking on the real DAT was near impossible.
QR (27) - This kind of math was stuff I had trained for when I did ACT in high school. I was lucky to have had exposure over the years to QR kind of problems. But I still watched all the DATBooster content for QR. Practice that I recommend for this is doing practice problems without the pressure of a clock. If any of you are musicians, you know that when you’re trying to learn a new skill, playing something in the practice room correctly is more important than playing something fast. Take the first steps slow, make sure you think of the correct formula/logic, then once you become more familiar, the speed will come on its own.
RC (22) - This section was tough. The prep that was helpful was highlighting RC practice tests. Once you know what it takes to skim your own notes really well, you’ll be set. If you don’t remember an answer from the passage immediately, good highlights are pretty effective in helping you find your answers.
Biology (26) - Bio started off being my weakest, so I gave this more attention than others. DATBooster practice materials helped so much! I didn’t know very much relevant biology except for the content from school maybe ~1.5 to 2 ish years ago. Feralis + Anki was a nice combo for me, but video tutorials were so much nicer personally because I like having visuals. If it came to it, I would look up content on YouTube to help me clear up confusions. I ended up not having enough time to read ecology notes, so I used the Booster cheat sheet and also asked my friend to sum up some concepts that I got wrong on practice exams. Genetics was something I was familiar with, so I didn’t stress about that as much.
Gen Chem (26) - Booster content!!!
Ochem (27) - Also Booster content! I didn’t do the worksheet for every video, but I did do Anki cards for ochem. If you don’t have good orgo notes from class, especially reaction schemes, make notes on Booster videos! Stuff like this is SUPER helpful when you wanna know ONE reaction like “I forgot what alkyne + BH3 leads to” or something like that. It will save you a lot of time when you’re reviewing. I was very lucky to have good notes + one of the most phenomenal orgo professors to ever exist on the face of the earth, so even though I started off low, I felt good knowing that I had a good toolbox already.
Example of notes I took from Booster ochem videos are in blue, class notes are in black.
More general things:
- cheat sheets day of/before exam
- know random terms like in situ, in vivo, etc.
- Google random stuff you don’t know
- look up tracheids & sieve tube members for visual
- Anki!!!! If you can't finish new content for the day, try to at least finish your Anki cards
- for Thanksgiving this year I was thankful that there was no physics on this exam
