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I hadn’t really planned on doing a breakdown because my scores are not very impressive when compared to a lot of peoples’ scores. I thought, however, that perhaps people could use some motivation and I feel like my DAT provides that. I am going to give a little background about me so feel free to scroll past to the breakdown if you like.
I am a non-traditional student in that it took me about 10 years to get my bachelor’s degree. I struggled with finding out what I wanted to do and really struggled academically the first 2 years of my college career (take your worst semester and subtract 2 grade points and you might be close). I am a biotechnology major and all of the prereqs and DAT classes were taken at least 6 years ago. I finally found out I wanted to do dental about 2 years ago and have been working toward attaining a goal I thought impossible since. Because of my low GPA I am taking a roundabout way to get to dental school in that I am going to obtain my masters first and then ideally I will attend after that. In the last year I have taken nearly 120 credits and this summer I took 39 in an accelerated 5 week semester. My classes actually ended about a week and half ago. This summer I got a 4.0. I knew that this would leave me with limited DAT study time though and so despite what many people do on this site I took a different approach.
I started studying for the DAT in January. I selected one topic and decided to focus on that first. I started by reading though Feralis notes first. I then read cliffs 10 pages each day taking detailed notes. I took 36 credits this last spring and so my time was limited, but I took diligent notes and reviewed my notes at the end of every week. After I finished I had a 2014 destroyer and started going through the questions. Again I took diligent notes on every question even the ones that I got right to ensure that I had a list of topics that I didn’t know. I did no more than 20 questions a day and at the end I compiled all of my notes. I then went through destroyer 50 to 75 questions at a time. Through this I was able to narrow down the broad topics that I was still getting wrong.
This took me up until May as I attended a research conference and had other family thing pop up. At this point I watched all of Chad’s GenChem videos and then watched Mike’s videos through Bootcamp. I took notes and did the quizzes that each one had. I just finished when my summer semester started and studying for the DAT took a backseat. I finished my last final on the 5th of this month and then took my first practice test on the 6th. I raced through Ochem and did practice tests from Kaplan, DAT Bootcamp and the 2009 and 2007 exams. I doubled up on practice tests some days which made to be long days. I did my best to look over each exam and again take notes on where I was deficient on both right and wrong answers.
I finally got to take my DAT today and start my Master’s degree on Monday. It has been a whirlwind of a few months. I want to thank all of SDN as reading your posts and getting to see questions answered and breakdowns given I was able to push through and get acceptable scores on the DAT.
Now without further ado I give the actual breakdown:
Biology (22): I am actually a little disappointed with this score as I thought I answered all but one confidently and am really curious where I got questions wrong here. I had a number of animal behavior and genetics questions. Those stood out to me as the heavy hitters at least on my exam. I used Bootcamp, Destroyer, Kahn Academy and Cliffs/Feralis. Feralis was great for me to get an idea of how I wanted to do my notes. I ended with over 100 pages of notes from Cliffs and the other pieces. I tend to remember a lot better if I physically write the notes though and thus did not really study from Feralis so much as use his notes as a guide to create my own. Cliffs was huge. I kept track of how I did on every question in destroyer and I average about 6 out 10 correct my first time through and I attribute much of that to cliffs. They second time that I went through Destroyer I only missed about 3/50 or so. I feel like, for me at least, all of these pieces were extremely important. I used destroyer and cliffs to build up a large base knowledge and then Bootcamp to test my speed and finalize a few thing that I was getting wrong.
General Chemistry (20): This was probably one of the tougher sections for me because I had very little practice when compared to the other parts of the DAT. I had a large amount of solubility, acid/base and electro chemistry. These are parts that I did not focus enough on as I got close to the DAT and my Bootcamp scores showed that as well. I used both Chads and Mikes videos to go over genchem and given that I have not taken this class in close to 8 years I will take what I got on the DAT. Both video sets were great. One issue that I had with both Mike’s Ochem and GenChem videos were that there are still some things that are wrong in the videos. I know that they are working hard to fix these issues and it sounds like they are planning to reshoot them, but that did make some of the information a little harder to learn with them. Chad’s videos were as great as most people say and there some things that I doubt I will ever forget thanks to both Chad and Mike.
Ochem (23): This was a bit of a shocker for me honestly. I thought I would do very poorly as I did not have time to really relearn ochem and it made me seriously consider pushing out my DAT because of my lack of confidence in this area. I mainly focused on Mikes videos only because they were broken up and labeled a little easier for me when compared to Chad’s but they were both good. Destroyer was hard and I struggled a lot going through it. I was able to learn a lot and of course taking detailed notes on everything that I learned was important. One thing in regards to destroyer on both Ochem and GenChem is that it is very calculation heavy. This was great because a lot of the calculations I was able to do quickly and without much problem because of the large number of questions that used them. That being said I had very few equation or mechanism questions in either one.
PAT (21): I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that all of the questions that I got wrong were angle ranking. I never really got the hang of it. Keyholes were really easy in my opinion with each answer relatively obvious. TFE was a little challenging at times but I felt comfortable with all of my answers. I used the grid method, not sure if it has a name, for hole punch and that never let me down on practice tests. The angle ranking was a crap shoot and I guessed on a fair amount of them. Cube counting I used the tally method and the only major downfall that I wasn’t expecting was that I ended up going through 7 different images which I was not expecting. I had one that only had one question for it. This rattled me a little as I was worried that time might start to play a factor given that it increased that amount of counting that I did by a decent amount. Pattern folding has always been the easiest for me. I don’t fold until I narrow down obvious wrong answers (incorrect shading, etc) then I fold if I have to and on Bootcamp I consistently got 14 or 15/15. I finished this section with 10 minutes remaining which made me glad that Bootcamp was harder on every section.
Reading Comprehension (24): was much easier than Bootcamp and many of the questions were straight picks from the articles and despite having 2 really odd articles it went rather smoothly. I am a researcher by trade/hobby and thus read a lot of scientific articles which I think helped me a lot in prepping for and doing this part of the test.
QR (19): Honestly, I am so thankful I got a 19 on this section. This was always going to be my worst section as I did very little studying for it and I hate math. As many people have said there was a large amount of quantitative comparison questions on the exam and I thought that both Bootcamp and the ones that Orgoman put out are great examples of what to expect. I had literally no trig on mine and very little geometry. I did have a lot of probability though, the one thing I know how to do well, and I think this is what saved me on the real DAT.
…….This is my breakdown. I want all of you still studying to know that if I can do this then so can you. I have an excel sheet with my study schedule as well as all my practice scores if anyone is randomly interested in how I did my study schedule. Feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to answer them. I want to thank you all again for everything that you post. It was extremely helpful and without SDN I am certain that I would have failed for sure. I am off to get some sleep before my daughter decides that she needs to sleep in our bed and I end up getting heel kicked to the face 2 or 3 times. J Good luck everyone!!
I am a non-traditional student in that it took me about 10 years to get my bachelor’s degree. I struggled with finding out what I wanted to do and really struggled academically the first 2 years of my college career (take your worst semester and subtract 2 grade points and you might be close). I am a biotechnology major and all of the prereqs and DAT classes were taken at least 6 years ago. I finally found out I wanted to do dental about 2 years ago and have been working toward attaining a goal I thought impossible since. Because of my low GPA I am taking a roundabout way to get to dental school in that I am going to obtain my masters first and then ideally I will attend after that. In the last year I have taken nearly 120 credits and this summer I took 39 in an accelerated 5 week semester. My classes actually ended about a week and half ago. This summer I got a 4.0. I knew that this would leave me with limited DAT study time though and so despite what many people do on this site I took a different approach.
I started studying for the DAT in January. I selected one topic and decided to focus on that first. I started by reading though Feralis notes first. I then read cliffs 10 pages each day taking detailed notes. I took 36 credits this last spring and so my time was limited, but I took diligent notes and reviewed my notes at the end of every week. After I finished I had a 2014 destroyer and started going through the questions. Again I took diligent notes on every question even the ones that I got right to ensure that I had a list of topics that I didn’t know. I did no more than 20 questions a day and at the end I compiled all of my notes. I then went through destroyer 50 to 75 questions at a time. Through this I was able to narrow down the broad topics that I was still getting wrong.
This took me up until May as I attended a research conference and had other family thing pop up. At this point I watched all of Chad’s GenChem videos and then watched Mike’s videos through Bootcamp. I took notes and did the quizzes that each one had. I just finished when my summer semester started and studying for the DAT took a backseat. I finished my last final on the 5th of this month and then took my first practice test on the 6th. I raced through Ochem and did practice tests from Kaplan, DAT Bootcamp and the 2009 and 2007 exams. I doubled up on practice tests some days which made to be long days. I did my best to look over each exam and again take notes on where I was deficient on both right and wrong answers.
I finally got to take my DAT today and start my Master’s degree on Monday. It has been a whirlwind of a few months. I want to thank all of SDN as reading your posts and getting to see questions answered and breakdowns given I was able to push through and get acceptable scores on the DAT.
Now without further ado I give the actual breakdown:
Biology (22): I am actually a little disappointed with this score as I thought I answered all but one confidently and am really curious where I got questions wrong here. I had a number of animal behavior and genetics questions. Those stood out to me as the heavy hitters at least on my exam. I used Bootcamp, Destroyer, Kahn Academy and Cliffs/Feralis. Feralis was great for me to get an idea of how I wanted to do my notes. I ended with over 100 pages of notes from Cliffs and the other pieces. I tend to remember a lot better if I physically write the notes though and thus did not really study from Feralis so much as use his notes as a guide to create my own. Cliffs was huge. I kept track of how I did on every question in destroyer and I average about 6 out 10 correct my first time through and I attribute much of that to cliffs. They second time that I went through Destroyer I only missed about 3/50 or so. I feel like, for me at least, all of these pieces were extremely important. I used destroyer and cliffs to build up a large base knowledge and then Bootcamp to test my speed and finalize a few thing that I was getting wrong.
General Chemistry (20): This was probably one of the tougher sections for me because I had very little practice when compared to the other parts of the DAT. I had a large amount of solubility, acid/base and electro chemistry. These are parts that I did not focus enough on as I got close to the DAT and my Bootcamp scores showed that as well. I used both Chads and Mikes videos to go over genchem and given that I have not taken this class in close to 8 years I will take what I got on the DAT. Both video sets were great. One issue that I had with both Mike’s Ochem and GenChem videos were that there are still some things that are wrong in the videos. I know that they are working hard to fix these issues and it sounds like they are planning to reshoot them, but that did make some of the information a little harder to learn with them. Chad’s videos were as great as most people say and there some things that I doubt I will ever forget thanks to both Chad and Mike.
Ochem (23): This was a bit of a shocker for me honestly. I thought I would do very poorly as I did not have time to really relearn ochem and it made me seriously consider pushing out my DAT because of my lack of confidence in this area. I mainly focused on Mikes videos only because they were broken up and labeled a little easier for me when compared to Chad’s but they were both good. Destroyer was hard and I struggled a lot going through it. I was able to learn a lot and of course taking detailed notes on everything that I learned was important. One thing in regards to destroyer on both Ochem and GenChem is that it is very calculation heavy. This was great because a lot of the calculations I was able to do quickly and without much problem because of the large number of questions that used them. That being said I had very few equation or mechanism questions in either one.
PAT (21): I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that all of the questions that I got wrong were angle ranking. I never really got the hang of it. Keyholes were really easy in my opinion with each answer relatively obvious. TFE was a little challenging at times but I felt comfortable with all of my answers. I used the grid method, not sure if it has a name, for hole punch and that never let me down on practice tests. The angle ranking was a crap shoot and I guessed on a fair amount of them. Cube counting I used the tally method and the only major downfall that I wasn’t expecting was that I ended up going through 7 different images which I was not expecting. I had one that only had one question for it. This rattled me a little as I was worried that time might start to play a factor given that it increased that amount of counting that I did by a decent amount. Pattern folding has always been the easiest for me. I don’t fold until I narrow down obvious wrong answers (incorrect shading, etc) then I fold if I have to and on Bootcamp I consistently got 14 or 15/15. I finished this section with 10 minutes remaining which made me glad that Bootcamp was harder on every section.
Reading Comprehension (24): was much easier than Bootcamp and many of the questions were straight picks from the articles and despite having 2 really odd articles it went rather smoothly. I am a researcher by trade/hobby and thus read a lot of scientific articles which I think helped me a lot in prepping for and doing this part of the test.
QR (19): Honestly, I am so thankful I got a 19 on this section. This was always going to be my worst section as I did very little studying for it and I hate math. As many people have said there was a large amount of quantitative comparison questions on the exam and I thought that both Bootcamp and the ones that Orgoman put out are great examples of what to expect. I had literally no trig on mine and very little geometry. I did have a lot of probability though, the one thing I know how to do well, and I think this is what saved me on the real DAT.
…….This is my breakdown. I want all of you still studying to know that if I can do this then so can you. I have an excel sheet with my study schedule as well as all my practice scores if anyone is randomly interested in how I did my study schedule. Feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to answer them. I want to thank you all again for everything that you post. It was extremely helpful and without SDN I am certain that I would have failed for sure. I am off to get some sleep before my daughter decides that she needs to sleep in our bed and I end up getting heel kicked to the face 2 or 3 times. J Good luck everyone!!
