- Joined
- Jul 17, 2014
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Hey everyone, I’ve been lurking around SDN for weeks and just took my DAT yesterday. I originally had no intention of doing one of these breakdowns, but reading other members’ breakdowns were incredibly helpful for me during my studies and hopefully I can now return the favor; it’s the least I can do!
My scores and my practice test scores (Bootcamp and ADA 2007 & 2009):
For me, saying that these scores were unexpected would be THE understatement of the century. I was completely shocked by what I got on some of these sections, especially the PAT. I marked nearly half of the bio questions during the science section and around 10 on the PAT, and I was cursing myself for not studying just a bit more. My Bootcamp and ADA practice test scores are definitely good, but I was really afraid that I was going to be that guy that scores lower on the real thing than the practice ones. I’m a chem major going into my junior year of undergrad with a solid, but not great, GPA. I finished Ochem this past spring, took Gchem during the fall of 2012, and haven’t taken biology since AP Bio in high school.
I would say I seriously started studying in early June, going for 4-5 hours a day then, taking most nights and weekends off (and working once a week). However, for the last three and a half weeks or so before my DAT, I honestly studied about 9-10 hours/day (with plenty of breaks!). I was in the library from about 9AM to 6 PM everyday, though I took most nights off to see friends or just vegetate. I also took the occasional 2-3 hours off to watch some of the World Cup games, which were great to help me take my mind off of the DAT. I did all of my practice tests in the last week and a half before test day. Bootcamp tests 1-4 and the 2007 ADA test I did in their entireties and devoted an entire afternoon to each one. I then did a few parts of the 2009 test and Bootcamp 5 the day before my test.
BIO: (Bootcamp 10/10, Cliffnotes 4th ed 8/10, Campbell’s 10th ed 9/10, Feralis notes 10/10, Kaplan 6/10, Destroyer 5/10)
Since I hadn’t taken biology for several years, biology was my main focus from day one. I made the mistake of buying the 4th edition of Cliffnotes (which I didn’t know until last week haha) and read through it twice, taking pretty detailed notes the second time. Kaplan, tbh, would be a good starting point to expose yourself to all of the stuff on the test, but it doesn’t quite cut it in terms of its detail and depth. I then gave Destroyer a shot, but the biology questions in Destroyer were so stupidly hard that I was incredibly discouraged and gave up after the first 100 questions (literally getting half of them wrong). After a panic attack about 3 weeks before my test, I got a hold of Campbell’s and read through about 2/3 of the book (mainly to fill in the holes from the topics left out of Cliffnotes 4th). I then did the practice tests (Bootcamp, ADA, etc.), but my scores were getting lower each day, so I panicked again, went through Cliffnotes and Feralis once again, and made about 300 notecards. I truly believe that these notecards were THE KEY to my bio score. Making the notecards and being able to run through the concepts and terminology one at a time really helped me remember everything (as opposed to staring at pages and pages of dense text and writing).
My actual test’s bio questions were on par with the Bootcamp ones and every bit as random as people say it is; I marked a lot of them and was very discouraged initially. However, I finished the science section with about 40 minutes to spare and spent all of that time going back through biology and was able to lay down pretty good guesses for the ones I was unsure of.
GC&OC: (Bootcamp 10/10, Destroyer 9/10, Organic Chemistry (txtbk, Bruice) 9/10, Chemistry (txtbk, Zumdahl) 9/10, Kaplan 6/10)
Like with bio, I started by going through Kaplan as an introduction/acquaintance to Gchem and Ochem. I then started Destroyer, doing around 30 problems/day (I was typically getting 65% of the questions right or so). After my previously mentioned panic attack, I dug up my Ochem and Gchem textbooks and read through each of them while taking plenty of notes. This didn’t really show in Destroyer, but I definitely improved on Bootcamp from day to day. When I finished making my bio notecards, I went through and made some chemistry notecards as well. They helped a lot.
My actual test’s Gchem was very similar to Bootcamp, while the Ochem was slightly easier than Bootcamp but very similar nonetheless. Numbers in the Gchem section were very straightforward, but watch out for units! Destroyer chem is just flat out harder than the real DAT, but I still highly recommend going through it just for the variety of questions Destroyer has. I didn’t make multiple passes through Destroyer and wouldn’t say its necessarily required, but it is very good. Don’t let yourself get discouraged by the difficulty like I did, it made it much more of a chore than I wanted it to be.
PAT: (Bootcamp 9/10, LUCK, Kaplan 8/10)
I don’t even know what to say here. I took the PAT in the Kaplan book about a month before my test day to gauge how much I would need to “study” for the PAT. I did better than I expected and really didn’t think about the PAT until Bootcamp. I found cube counting and folding pretty easy, keyholes and TFE decent, and angles and pattern folding very difficult (I swear I got every other angle one wrong). For keyholes and TFE, I really had no strategy (the way I approached it really depended on the particular problem). I used the tally/table method for cube counting, which worked wonderfully (and was very quick!). Bootcamp is great practice (quality and quantity), but it was considerably harder than the real thing. I took the ADA 2007 and 2009 PAT’s shortly before my test and they were much easier (and closer to the real thing), which was a much needed confidence boost.
Like I said, I have no idea how I managed a 30 PAT. When I saw the number on the screen, I thought it was one hell of a mistake. I didn’t find the PAT too hard, but I guessed on at least 5 questions. I never even got remotely close to full score on any of the practice PAT’s I took! This one was not on me; this one was honestly all luck.
RC: (Bootcamp 10/10)
I did nothing towards RC until I started Bootcamp 10 days or so before my test, and boy was Bootcamp a wake up call. I struggled to finish all of those practice tests in time, especially on ones with articles that didn’t really interest me. From other breakdowns, I learned about search and destroy and gave that a shot, but I would lose focus quickly and end up reading most of the article anyways trying to piece together answers.
The Bootcamp articles are very similar in length and detail to the real ones I had. I just read through the article as fast as I could (not in great detail at all), which allowed me to find specific parts in the passage quickly when answering the questions. I was lucky on this sections once again, as the three articles I got were all very interesting, and I was able to read through them quickly while retaining a lot of the details.
QR: (Bootcamp 9/10, Destroyer 8/10)
I’ve always been pretty good at the more simple forms of math (ie anything but calculus!), so I didn’t devote any time to actually study math. I did about 50 math problems in Destroyer and the Bootcamp and ADA QR sections and just took note of what I got wrong on each one. I feel like Destroyer is fairly comparable to the real thing. As many people on SDN have said, Bootcamp’s QR is definitely harder than the real thing and I wasn’t able to finish at least two of the QR’s on there. However, it got me used to thinking/working quickly and really did a good job of highlighting my weaknesses.
My actual test was around 35 straightforward questions and 5 trickier, Destroyer/Bootcamp level ones. Like with science, I managed to get through math with a decent amount of time remaining and spent that time really working out the difficult problems. Any numbers that were weird/more complex were clearly calculator questions. As for the calculator itself, I experienced no lag whatsoever and found the real thing much easier to use than the Bootcamp one.
In short: I worked hard, but I also got lucky. @Ari Rezaei and co. are good people, and I am forever grateful!
My scores and my practice test scores (Bootcamp and ADA 2007 & 2009):
For me, saying that these scores were unexpected would be THE understatement of the century. I was completely shocked by what I got on some of these sections, especially the PAT. I marked nearly half of the bio questions during the science section and around 10 on the PAT, and I was cursing myself for not studying just a bit more. My Bootcamp and ADA practice test scores are definitely good, but I was really afraid that I was going to be that guy that scores lower on the real thing than the practice ones. I’m a chem major going into my junior year of undergrad with a solid, but not great, GPA. I finished Ochem this past spring, took Gchem during the fall of 2012, and haven’t taken biology since AP Bio in high school.
I would say I seriously started studying in early June, going for 4-5 hours a day then, taking most nights and weekends off (and working once a week). However, for the last three and a half weeks or so before my DAT, I honestly studied about 9-10 hours/day (with plenty of breaks!). I was in the library from about 9AM to 6 PM everyday, though I took most nights off to see friends or just vegetate. I also took the occasional 2-3 hours off to watch some of the World Cup games, which were great to help me take my mind off of the DAT. I did all of my practice tests in the last week and a half before test day. Bootcamp tests 1-4 and the 2007 ADA test I did in their entireties and devoted an entire afternoon to each one. I then did a few parts of the 2009 test and Bootcamp 5 the day before my test.
BIO: (Bootcamp 10/10, Cliffnotes 4th ed 8/10, Campbell’s 10th ed 9/10, Feralis notes 10/10, Kaplan 6/10, Destroyer 5/10)
Since I hadn’t taken biology for several years, biology was my main focus from day one. I made the mistake of buying the 4th edition of Cliffnotes (which I didn’t know until last week haha) and read through it twice, taking pretty detailed notes the second time. Kaplan, tbh, would be a good starting point to expose yourself to all of the stuff on the test, but it doesn’t quite cut it in terms of its detail and depth. I then gave Destroyer a shot, but the biology questions in Destroyer were so stupidly hard that I was incredibly discouraged and gave up after the first 100 questions (literally getting half of them wrong). After a panic attack about 3 weeks before my test, I got a hold of Campbell’s and read through about 2/3 of the book (mainly to fill in the holes from the topics left out of Cliffnotes 4th). I then did the practice tests (Bootcamp, ADA, etc.), but my scores were getting lower each day, so I panicked again, went through Cliffnotes and Feralis once again, and made about 300 notecards. I truly believe that these notecards were THE KEY to my bio score. Making the notecards and being able to run through the concepts and terminology one at a time really helped me remember everything (as opposed to staring at pages and pages of dense text and writing).
My actual test’s bio questions were on par with the Bootcamp ones and every bit as random as people say it is; I marked a lot of them and was very discouraged initially. However, I finished the science section with about 40 minutes to spare and spent all of that time going back through biology and was able to lay down pretty good guesses for the ones I was unsure of.
GC&OC: (Bootcamp 10/10, Destroyer 9/10, Organic Chemistry (txtbk, Bruice) 9/10, Chemistry (txtbk, Zumdahl) 9/10, Kaplan 6/10)
Like with bio, I started by going through Kaplan as an introduction/acquaintance to Gchem and Ochem. I then started Destroyer, doing around 30 problems/day (I was typically getting 65% of the questions right or so). After my previously mentioned panic attack, I dug up my Ochem and Gchem textbooks and read through each of them while taking plenty of notes. This didn’t really show in Destroyer, but I definitely improved on Bootcamp from day to day. When I finished making my bio notecards, I went through and made some chemistry notecards as well. They helped a lot.
My actual test’s Gchem was very similar to Bootcamp, while the Ochem was slightly easier than Bootcamp but very similar nonetheless. Numbers in the Gchem section were very straightforward, but watch out for units! Destroyer chem is just flat out harder than the real DAT, but I still highly recommend going through it just for the variety of questions Destroyer has. I didn’t make multiple passes through Destroyer and wouldn’t say its necessarily required, but it is very good. Don’t let yourself get discouraged by the difficulty like I did, it made it much more of a chore than I wanted it to be.
PAT: (Bootcamp 9/10, LUCK, Kaplan 8/10)
I don’t even know what to say here. I took the PAT in the Kaplan book about a month before my test day to gauge how much I would need to “study” for the PAT. I did better than I expected and really didn’t think about the PAT until Bootcamp. I found cube counting and folding pretty easy, keyholes and TFE decent, and angles and pattern folding very difficult (I swear I got every other angle one wrong). For keyholes and TFE, I really had no strategy (the way I approached it really depended on the particular problem). I used the tally/table method for cube counting, which worked wonderfully (and was very quick!). Bootcamp is great practice (quality and quantity), but it was considerably harder than the real thing. I took the ADA 2007 and 2009 PAT’s shortly before my test and they were much easier (and closer to the real thing), which was a much needed confidence boost.
Like I said, I have no idea how I managed a 30 PAT. When I saw the number on the screen, I thought it was one hell of a mistake. I didn’t find the PAT too hard, but I guessed on at least 5 questions. I never even got remotely close to full score on any of the practice PAT’s I took! This one was not on me; this one was honestly all luck.
RC: (Bootcamp 10/10)
I did nothing towards RC until I started Bootcamp 10 days or so before my test, and boy was Bootcamp a wake up call. I struggled to finish all of those practice tests in time, especially on ones with articles that didn’t really interest me. From other breakdowns, I learned about search and destroy and gave that a shot, but I would lose focus quickly and end up reading most of the article anyways trying to piece together answers.
The Bootcamp articles are very similar in length and detail to the real ones I had. I just read through the article as fast as I could (not in great detail at all), which allowed me to find specific parts in the passage quickly when answering the questions. I was lucky on this sections once again, as the three articles I got were all very interesting, and I was able to read through them quickly while retaining a lot of the details.
QR: (Bootcamp 9/10, Destroyer 8/10)
I’ve always been pretty good at the more simple forms of math (ie anything but calculus!), so I didn’t devote any time to actually study math. I did about 50 math problems in Destroyer and the Bootcamp and ADA QR sections and just took note of what I got wrong on each one. I feel like Destroyer is fairly comparable to the real thing. As many people on SDN have said, Bootcamp’s QR is definitely harder than the real thing and I wasn’t able to finish at least two of the QR’s on there. However, it got me used to thinking/working quickly and really did a good job of highlighting my weaknesses.
My actual test was around 35 straightforward questions and 5 trickier, Destroyer/Bootcamp level ones. Like with science, I managed to get through math with a decent amount of time remaining and spent that time really working out the difficult problems. Any numbers that were weird/more complex were clearly calculator questions. As for the calculator itself, I experienced no lag whatsoever and found the real thing much easier to use than the Bootcamp one.
In short: I worked hard, but I also got lucky. @Ari Rezaei and co. are good people, and I am forever grateful!
