DAT done 8/15 w/ breakdown

[zhaozilong]

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finished today!

PAT: 20 (73.8)
Quantitative reasoning: 22 (96.4)
Reading comp: 26 (98.8)
Biology: 20 (86.5)
General Chemistry: 24 (96.4)
Organic Chemistry 23 (93.4
Total Science: 22 (94.8)
Academic Average: 23 (98.1)

Materials used:

DAT destroyer: DAT destroyer was really useful. esp. for ochem and chem. For ochem and chem it was overkill but I think all the preparation and hard problems really prepared me for the tougher questions. When an exam is scored like the DAT is, the higher you go, the more crucial those few hardest questions are. DAT destroyer bio was good, but it definitely wasn't as good as chem and ochem. I would have to say that it definitely prepares you for a lot of different tough questions, but the scope of the bio section is too broad and you need to cover your weak areas well. I'm just going to say that I thought I knew what my weak areas were, but even a couple days before the exam i was starting to realize that i had more weak areas than i thought. i wish that before starting to study I had taken my old campbell biology book and just sat down and read all the chapters that i was fuzzy on or that i had never looked at in high school/college. I went through the DAT destroyer twice and then the night before and the morning of the exam i just looked at all the questions that I had previously gotten wrong. that helped a ton.

Crack the DAT PAT and Math: Math i only ended up doing two of the 10 practice exams. I got a 28 on the first one and a 24 on the second. at that point i figured that there wasn't any point in studying for math anymore so i just focused on destroyer and PAT. One thing that i would say about math tho is that I have a really good algebraic background and if you do a lot of the algebraic gen chem problems that college students do, you'll get really good at mashing formulas together and solving problems just by using shortcuts instead of actually having to work them out. Crack the DAT PAT was really good.

a really old kaplan practice test that i found: i thought it was kinda useful b/c it made me realize early on that i needed to study a lot more and it showed me a lot of different areas where i needed to brush up on my knowledge because i was getting basic questions wrong.

General thoughts:
Reading wasn't too bad. I used a strategy where I went through question by question half reading half scanning. For my strategy, it helps to practice so you can get to the point where you can take a specific word from the question and just look at paragraphs like you would a picture and see if you can find it. kind of like a where's wally game, but with words. don't think of the paragraph as being a paragraph and maybe your brain can automatically recognize whatever word you're looking for, or at least that's how my brain works. DEFINITELY SPEND SOME TIME DOING THOSE CHEMISTRY CALCULATION PROBLEMS! they'll help you with chemistry and math at the same time.

Good luck to everyone who's studying for the DAT. Just study hard and hope for the best.

 

[supergenius310]

Amazing job. Did you use Chad's videos, DAT Bootcamp, or DATqVault at all? If you didn't ...holy mother of god you are smart.

 

[zhaozilong]

I only used what I listed. I got a lot of information from these forums, though. I felt that I had materials that people said were comparable to the actual DAT, so I just took off from there. I wish I had more PAT practice materials, though. I feel like I got better and better with practice (went from 17 and slowly improved to 23 over the 10 tests). However, the 10 tests that came might not have been enough because I felt that since I was getting better over time, I hadn't practiced enough to hit any level that I perceived to be a ceiling. The fact that I got a lower score than the average of the crack the PAT scores indicates to me that I should have practiced more and gotten more consistency. If I was going to retake this, I would get some more PAT practice material. One thing that the 10 tests is enough for, though, is the angles. Since the angles are pretty hard and the different angle practice questions aren't that distinct, I spend a little while going through all the tests and just doing angles over and over.
I think one thing that really helped me with DAT is that it hasn't been too long since I've taken the actual college classes. I was actually surprised at how much I remembered when I started reviewing, even though I still got destroyed by DAT destroyer. Having done well on the SAT back in the day was a good confidence booster too. After all, there's not too much difference between SAT reading and math and DAT reading and math. The DAT is just a step up from the SAT in those subjects imo.