I have been reading many post on how difficult hole punching is on the crack the dat and on the dat. Its weird to me because I have always been getting 15 out of 15 on them especially on crack the pat and are my favorite section of the PAT. so here I will share my secret on doing well on this part of the PAT. The best strategy I found to work efficiently well that it makes this section extremely easy is to use the tic tac toe grid on a sheet of paper and plug in Xs where the holes are. This enables you to solve the problem without memorizing where previous holes are. Makes it a lot easy. I had four 21s and one 23 on crack pat, three 22 on topscore(finished with 10 minutes to spare on all of them) and on the real DAT I got a 20(finished with 9 mins to spare), so I hope this solves all the problems you all are having on the hole punching problems. If you need any more tips on the other PAT sections please feel free to ask because I too had problems at first (scored a 15 on my first crack pat test due to 30 problems I didn't do) but finally found methods that made this section fun and easy.🙂