- Joined
- Mar 5, 2015
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Good morning everyone- I’m a long-time lurker on the SD forums and thought I would post about my recent DAT experience, now that it’s over thankfully!
Background: liberal arts major that did a (self-made) post bacc for pre med. Took the MCAT twice and got scores of 11, 08, 10 on the first attempt and 10, 09, 10 on the second (PS, Verbal, BS). Studied full-time for about a month before each attempt. I had retaken the MCAT at the end of January, and started studying for the DAT in early February. As you can tell from my MCAT scores, I'm no science genius and a very average-to-below-average test taker.
DAT materials used: TSP/GS 5 Practice Test Package, Bootcamp, and Crack DAT PAT. Used Feralis’ Notes for a little bit at the end.
Score
PAT: 20, QR: 16, RC: 25, Bio: 23, Gen Chem: 27, Orgo: 20, TS: 23, AA: 22
Biology: DAT Score 24
Bootcamp: 20, 21, 19, 20, 19
TSP Practice Tests: 17, 15, 19
Gold Standard: 19, 19
Maybe I got lucky, but bio was easier than I expected it to be. Some questions weren’t so straightforward and required a couple steps in logic, and a few were very detail oriented, but I nothing felt like it came out of left field.
Chem: DAT Score: 27
Bootcamp: 20, 19, 20, 18, 18
TSP Practice Tests: 14, 20, 16
Gold Standard: 17, 19
Bootcamp’s Chem section I think is especially well put together and extremely representative of what I saw on test day. Some questions were nearly identical. Reading the explanations was helpful for remembering basic concepts such as periodic trends.
Orgo: DAT Score: 20
Bootcamp: 17, 18, 16, 20, 18
TSP Practice Tests: 17, 20, 17
Gold Standard: 18, 19
Orgo’s never been my strong suit. I did well in Orgo I but that was *ages* ago and Orgo II was a miserable class for me. Nothing unusual to comment here; I thought it was a fair test.
PAT: DAT Score 20
Bootcamp: 19, 18, 18, 18, 19
TSP: 18, 19
Gold Standard: 19, 19
CDP: 17, 17, 18, 18, 20
Angles were definitely on the easier side, but everything else was about at the same level of difficulty as I’d encountered in practice tests. Unfortunately I had made a habit of skipping to the cubes section first and doing the test out of order. On the real DAT I **do not recommend this**. Moving from q to q takes anywhere from 0.5 to 1 seconds and that time adds up my friend. On my laptop at home I could clickclickclick to it in a matter of moments but it took so much time on the testing computers that by the time I got to angles I thought I’d better do them while I’m here. Ran out of time and had to guess on around 5 questions. One unexpected annoyance on the real DAT was on the hole-punching section. Sometimes the hole on the example paper would be unusually big or small so that it was difficult to tell what “box” it was in on the 4x4 quadrant, despite the answers being standard size.
Reading: DAT Score 25
Bootcamp: 16, 17 (I got frustrated with the difficulty of Bootcamp’s reading sections and only took two)
TSP: 22, 22
GS: 19, 19
Since RC went well for me I thought I’d make a couple of comments. Search and destroy may have worked in the past, but I firmly believe the tests are designed to thwart people that approach with this method now. A question that calls for numerical answers may have them in the text as words. (Completely made-up ex: a 100 mL, etc. may be seen in the text as “one-hundred milliliters”). Unless you have “special eyes” I doubt you’d be able to find that with a quick scan. Without looking at any of the questions ahead of time I read the entire passage over 10-12 minutes, making notes on my sheet as I went along of strange words, names, dates, and relationships in outline format. Used lots of arrows and abbreviations. Most of the questions could be answered just from memory and a few required me to go back to the text, but with my roadmap it made things easy. I’m not the fastest reader and ended up having to guess on about 2-3 questions at the very end.
QR: DAT Score 16
Bootcamp: 20, 20
TSP: 17, 19
GS: 16, 19
Needless to say I screwed the pooch on this one. Ran out of time and guessed on around 5 questions, but I was surprised at how low my score was compared to the other sections since I'd guessed in other places as well. Bootcamp’s QR is good but I the practice tests have a disproportionate amount of difficult questions. I would have benefited more from quantity over quality and if I were to do it again would purchase Math Destroyer, which I’d heard good things about. My main issue wasn’t difficulty but TIME. You just don’t have the luxury.
Since none of the schools I want to apply to have a QR cutoff I don’t think I’ll be retaking. A big thanks to the student doctor community for discussions on test strategies and prep material!
Background: liberal arts major that did a (self-made) post bacc for pre med. Took the MCAT twice and got scores of 11, 08, 10 on the first attempt and 10, 09, 10 on the second (PS, Verbal, BS). Studied full-time for about a month before each attempt. I had retaken the MCAT at the end of January, and started studying for the DAT in early February. As you can tell from my MCAT scores, I'm no science genius and a very average-to-below-average test taker.
DAT materials used: TSP/GS 5 Practice Test Package, Bootcamp, and Crack DAT PAT. Used Feralis’ Notes for a little bit at the end.
Score
PAT: 20, QR: 16, RC: 25, Bio: 23, Gen Chem: 27, Orgo: 20, TS: 23, AA: 22
Biology: DAT Score 24
Bootcamp: 20, 21, 19, 20, 19
TSP Practice Tests: 17, 15, 19
Gold Standard: 19, 19
Maybe I got lucky, but bio was easier than I expected it to be. Some questions weren’t so straightforward and required a couple steps in logic, and a few were very detail oriented, but I nothing felt like it came out of left field.
Chem: DAT Score: 27
Bootcamp: 20, 19, 20, 18, 18
TSP Practice Tests: 14, 20, 16
Gold Standard: 17, 19
Bootcamp’s Chem section I think is especially well put together and extremely representative of what I saw on test day. Some questions were nearly identical. Reading the explanations was helpful for remembering basic concepts such as periodic trends.
Orgo: DAT Score: 20
Bootcamp: 17, 18, 16, 20, 18
TSP Practice Tests: 17, 20, 17
Gold Standard: 18, 19
Orgo’s never been my strong suit. I did well in Orgo I but that was *ages* ago and Orgo II was a miserable class for me. Nothing unusual to comment here; I thought it was a fair test.
PAT: DAT Score 20
Bootcamp: 19, 18, 18, 18, 19
TSP: 18, 19
Gold Standard: 19, 19
CDP: 17, 17, 18, 18, 20
Angles were definitely on the easier side, but everything else was about at the same level of difficulty as I’d encountered in practice tests. Unfortunately I had made a habit of skipping to the cubes section first and doing the test out of order. On the real DAT I **do not recommend this**. Moving from q to q takes anywhere from 0.5 to 1 seconds and that time adds up my friend. On my laptop at home I could clickclickclick to it in a matter of moments but it took so much time on the testing computers that by the time I got to angles I thought I’d better do them while I’m here. Ran out of time and had to guess on around 5 questions. One unexpected annoyance on the real DAT was on the hole-punching section. Sometimes the hole on the example paper would be unusually big or small so that it was difficult to tell what “box” it was in on the 4x4 quadrant, despite the answers being standard size.
Reading: DAT Score 25
Bootcamp: 16, 17 (I got frustrated with the difficulty of Bootcamp’s reading sections and only took two)
TSP: 22, 22
GS: 19, 19
Since RC went well for me I thought I’d make a couple of comments. Search and destroy may have worked in the past, but I firmly believe the tests are designed to thwart people that approach with this method now. A question that calls for numerical answers may have them in the text as words. (Completely made-up ex: a 100 mL, etc. may be seen in the text as “one-hundred milliliters”). Unless you have “special eyes” I doubt you’d be able to find that with a quick scan. Without looking at any of the questions ahead of time I read the entire passage over 10-12 minutes, making notes on my sheet as I went along of strange words, names, dates, and relationships in outline format. Used lots of arrows and abbreviations. Most of the questions could be answered just from memory and a few required me to go back to the text, but with my roadmap it made things easy. I’m not the fastest reader and ended up having to guess on about 2-3 questions at the very end.
QR: DAT Score 16
Bootcamp: 20, 20
TSP: 17, 19
GS: 16, 19
Needless to say I screwed the pooch on this one. Ran out of time and guessed on around 5 questions, but I was surprised at how low my score was compared to the other sections since I'd guessed in other places as well. Bootcamp’s QR is good but I the practice tests have a disproportionate amount of difficult questions. I would have benefited more from quantity over quality and if I were to do it again would purchase Math Destroyer, which I’d heard good things about. My main issue wasn’t difficulty but TIME. You just don’t have the luxury.
Since none of the schools I want to apply to have a QR cutoff I don’t think I’ll be retaking. A big thanks to the student doctor community for discussions on test strategies and prep material!
I have the same habit with you when I skipped the one that im not good and do the one that I'm good first to have more time at the hard parts 