Any advise on TFE??? I am going nuts.

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Dental24/7

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I started PAT with someone teaching me online. Of course, I learned the line counting method from someone online and it got stuck. I know we cant do that anymore (figures!) and now i am struggling. Any advise? Please let me know. Id be forever grateful!
 
Alright so this is the problem from Bootcamp that I chose:
2BSHkF1.png


You'll notice right away that the line counting method won't get you the final answer. Sure, sometimes it can help you eliminate an answer or two, but I found in the long run, it was just a waste of time because you weren't guaranteed anything. A lot of people say to try and visualize the 3-d object, but I found that was a little difficult sometimes. If you can do it, it helps a ton. If not, It's best to try and eliminate answer choices based on seeing what types of lines should be where.

So the first thing I do is try to find something that is very distinct and easy to find. So I look at the the front view and see the right angle on the right side. From the end view, this right angle will form a solid line because we can directly see where shape changes. So then we go to look at the answer and try to find that solid line. Every answer choice has that solid line right there, so we are unable to eliminate any answers.

Now I just move my eyes down a bit from that right angle on the front view and see that little indention. Because we can see the indention from looking on from the end view, we know that the closest line up from the bottom will be solid. This shows us that we can eliminate Answer Choice A.

Now I move up to that circle we can see on the front view image. If we find where that circle is supposed to be on the top view, we'll notice that it forms a cylinder shaped whole through the entire object (this is important because in some problems you'll see something like this that will only go halfway through or something. From the end view, we can't actually see that cylinder shaped hole through the object, so it will have to be a dashed line. But how many? The circle doesn't form any angles like a triangle would, so we should see a dashed line representing the bottom edge of the circle as well as the top edge of the circle. If we look at our remaining answer choices B, C, and D, we'll see that D is the only that has these two dashed lines, and therefore, D is the Correct Answer.

Notice we didn't even have to deal with any of that top part of the image from the end view. Speed is key in this section of the test, so instead of trying to find an image that will fit everything you see, I think it's best to just find ways you can eliminate other answers and decide on an answer choice from there.
 
@ImSirius Thanks. This helps. I used to do that before i watch the youtube video that totally messed me up. Are the ones on the DAT this clear? I know some on the 2009 and 2007 PAT are very busy looking and I get confused.

Thanks alot for responds. 🙂
 
@ImSirius Thanks. This helps. I used to do that before i watch the youtube video that totally messed me up. Are the ones on the DAT this clear? I know some on the 2009 and 2007 PAT are very busy looking and I get confused.

Thanks alot for responds. 🙂
Eh it depends. This definitely has more defined lines but if you perfect your strategy with this then you should be able to do fine on the actual DAT
 
Well not everyone can do that in their head in that amount of time. @rich123321 Shortcut methods are necessary to eliminate.
It took me maybe an hour with the visualizer to go from guessing on 15 TFE questions on all my practice tests to actually having a shot at answering maybe half of them properly before running out of time
 
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