Dat done 6/21/2011

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

Alphanumerdent

Full Member
10+ Year Member
Joined
Mar 26, 2010
Messages
33
Reaction score
0
Sup playas. Im done with the DAT. Really happy with the results. I owe a great deal of the credit to the amazing info shared on this forum.

The breakdown:
AA 23 (98.1 percentile)
TS 22 (94.8 percentile)
PAT 21 (83.1 percentile)
BIO 25 (99.1 percentile)
GC 22 (89.2 percentile)
OC 22 (88.7 percentile)
RC 24 (94.4 percentile)
QR 24 (98.4 percentile)

So like I said Im pretty happy. I think I have a good application but not perfect so Im sure this will help if anything will.

Here is what helped. None of it is new, its all stuff you have shared, I didnt do a course, just followed the advice from you old pros on here.

BIO:I spent easily 5x more time on this than any other subject as I was the most worried about it. I went carefully through Cliffs AP biology and made flash cards of every single chapter, then I went through Kaplan biology and added a few flash cards to my stack of anything new. Then i went through DAT destroyer and added number of new flashcards to my stack. then i did as many practice biology tests as I could, probably about 12. As I went through I noted subjects i was weak on and studied further on them ie excretion, female menstrual cycle, and taxonomy (i used wikipedia and schuams for further study ups). For taxonomy I studied out schuams. I def had a couple taxonomy questions on the DAT that i was glad I knew my crap.

GC: Chads videos on ***********.com are insanely good. This alone is probably good enough though I did follow it up with Destroyer, mostly to get good at problems requiring number crunching/equations.

OC: Same thing. Chads videos are all you need though I followed it up with Destroyer which has alot of crap youll never see but does help broaden your scope a bit.

PAT: Crack the DAT PAT. I wouldn't do anything else except a few rounds of this until you are getting the scores you want.

RC: The technique I used is not very fancy but I tried alot of the fancier ones and they didnt work for me at all. All I did was skip the passage, look at the questions one by one and scan the passage for key terms. The first sentence gives the rest of the paragraph away often times. For questions about authors purpose etc i either came back to or scanned first and last paragraph. I got lucky here in that I knew a little bit about all three topics and any questions I thought I knew the answer to I answered without reading. The topics were: gene therapy/recombination (I just finished molecular biology), prions (Achiever had a passage on prions that was diff but i learned enough to make it easy), and fiber optics (i knew the basic idea of how they worked).

QR: Math Destroyer. I did about 7 practice tests. I felt like the real test was VERY similar to the real dat. I felt like the key was to FINISH THE TEST at all cost. skip the 4-8 questions immediately that you see will require some time or thought to figure out and come back to them at the end.

Other thoughts: I set what I felt was a high goal of a 24 (AA) but also believed I could achieve it (if I am doing the math right then I was a tenth of a point away from it at a 23.4!) I think you really need to go in with the attitude of getting 30s on the science sections, "I will master this material and know it all." Another thing I did was I stopped doing practice tests about a week before my test because I wanted to just review and BUILD my confidence. I also exercised the morning of, and did a lot of praying. Try praying everday while you study and before the exam. I find that talking openly with god about my feelings and asking for help/giving thanks really helped me concentrate a lot better.

Anyways feels very good to be done!

Members don't see this ad.
 
Last edited:
Sup playas. Im done with the DAT. Really happy with the results. I owe a great deal of the credit to the amazing info shared on this forum.

The breakdown:
AA 23
TS 22
PAT 21
BIO 25
GC 22
OC 22
RC 24
QR 24

So like I said Im pretty happy. I think I have a good application but not perfect so Im sure this will help if anything will.

Here is what helped. None of it is new, its all stuff you have shared, I didnt do a course, just followed the advice from you old pros on here.

BIO:I spent easily 5x more time on this than any other subject as I was the most worried about it. I went carefully through Cliffs AP biology and made flash cards of every single chapter, then I went through Kaplan biology and added a few flash cards to my stack of anything new. Then i went through DAT destroyer and added number of new flashcards to my stack. then i did as many practice biology tests as I could, probably about 12. As I went through I noted subjects i was weak on and studied further on them ie excretion, female menstrual cycle, and taxonomy (i used wikipedia and schuams for further study ups). For taxonomy I studied out schuams. I def had a couple taxonomy questions on the DAT that i was glad I knew my crap.

GC: Chads videos on ***********.com are insanely good. This alone is probably good enough though I did follow it up with Destroyer, mostly to get good at problems requiring number crunching/equations.

OC: Same thing. Chads videos are all you need though I followed it up with Destroyer which has alot of crap youll never see but does help broaden your scope a bit.

PAT: Crack the DAT PAT. I wouldn't do anything else except a few rounds of this until you are getting the scores you want.

RC: The technique I used is not very fancy but I tried alot of the fancier ones and they didnt work for me at all. All I did was skip the passage, look at the questions one by one and scan the passage for key terms. The first sentence gives the rest of the paragraph away often times. For questions about authors purpose etc i either came back to or scanned first and last paragraph. I got lucky here in that I knew a little bit about all three topics and any questions I thought I knew the answer to I answered without reading. The topics were: gene therapy/recombination (I just finished molecular biology), prions (Achiever had a passage on prions that was diff but i learned enough to make it easy), and fiber optics (i knew the basic idea of how they worked).

QR: Math Destroyer. I did about 7 practice tests. I felt like the real test was VERY similar to the real dat. I felt like the key was to FINISH THE TEST at all cost. skip the 4-8 questions immediately that you see will require some time or thought to figure out and come back to them at the end.

Other thoughts: I set what I felt was a high goal of a 24 (AA) but also believed I could achieve it (if I am doing the math right then I was a tenth of a point away from it at a 23.4!) I think you really need to go in with the attitude of getting 30s on the science sections, "I will master this material and know it all." Another thing I did was I stopped doing practice tests about a week before my test because I wanted to just review and BUILD my confidence. I also exercised the morning of, and did a lot of praying. Try praying everday while you study and before the exam. I find that talking openly with god about my feelings and asking for help/giving thanks really helped me concentrate a lot better.

Anyways feels very good to be done!

It's refreshing to see everyone saying to pray. My parents recently went to Europe and bought me a Rosary from the Vatican. I plan on wearing it or taking it in with me when I actually take the DAT. There has been a quote in my mind that keeps repeating, "He, who walks with God shall fear no man." Since the DAT was made by man I guess we shouldn't fear it.

Another quote I find pretty funny is one my mom would always tell me, "They can try to take God out of schools, but as long as there are exams there will be prayers."

PS- AMAZING JOB!!! :)
 
Members don't see this ad :)
amazing job! what were the scores of the practice tests and which ones do you think helped or were the most similar to the real thing?
 
The practice tests I used were a bunch of kaplan practice tests, the Achiever tests, the free ada practice dat, and then just questions from cliffs ap bio, dat destroyer, and chads video quizzes.
The scores I was getting were:

Kaplan: i kept getting a 19 or 20 in bio and low 20s -mid 20s for gchem/ochem

Achiever: I mostly got 18 and 19 in the Natural sciences. A 16 in one of the bio sections too. This was much harder than the real test. But it was still valuable. Id approach this as a learning opportunity and a gauge of weak topics not a gauge of how you will do.

ADA practice DAT: I got like a 27 or something on this, and as alot of have said this is easier than the real dat. that being said these questions are the closest to what real dat questions are actually like i felt like. They obviously were made by the same test makers and alot actually were the same difficulty of the real test, the exception being the real test had like 3-5 more random/challenging questions on each section that I guess is made to separate the men from the boys and thats where having done a million practice questions comes in handy.

All in all, I recommend doing as many questions as you can get your hands on. Take notes on every single question you miss. You begin to see alot of trends in all the different tests of common things that are asked and those trends appear on the real dat.
 
Hey congrats, I am also another firm beleiver in praying before studying and before the test. To bad i dont have a rosary from the vatican
 
Fine, I'm going to start praying too. But I don't think the good Lord will be happy that I only tend to do this when I have upcoming exams.
 
Top