I finished the DAT and I don't know how to feel. I met my goal of 20 AA, but my QR score...ouch! I was so distraught, I cried the 90 mile drive home from the testing center.
Biology: I was most worried about this section. I haven't taken that many biology classes, and most of the ones I have taken, I took several years ago when I wasn't serious about school and had no direction in my life. Studying for the DAT and paying attention in physiology last semester paid off, and I'm pleased.
General chemistry: It was a lot less time-consuming than any practice exam I took. The concepts were just as difficult, but the calculations were few and straightforward.
Organic chemistry: I hardly remember even taking this section. I was in a daze. I guess I did alright though.
PAT: I was doing really well in this section until I hit a cube-counting question that looked insane. You know those optical illusions with the blocks where if you look at them long enough, the blocks float upside down instead of sitting upright? One of the problems kept doing that to me. I think it was the clarity and large size of the flat screen monitors at the testing center that caused the illusion, but I know I missed 3-4 problems just from that one set of cubes.
RC: I didn't get the ethics or piano passages. I read the first two passages, but I was running short on time for the last one and I had to search-and-destroy for it. I think that hurt my score.
QR: Pigs are flying, hell has frozen, and the fat lady's singing! I just bombed a math test. I have an engineering degree for Pete's sake! Math is my THING! I got a perfect 36 on the math section of the ACT and I aced differential equations, but apparently high school math is too much for me now. I had a lot of fractions-within-fractions-within-fractions problems, strange trig problems, and a 3-D graph that was blurry. I had 15 questions with 5 minutes left, so I had to do a lot of guessing. I think I got the mathematical equivalent of the FRAP ethics passage. I'm having a total identity crisis with this one. Will people question if I even HAVE an engineering degree with such a bad QR score? My only consolation is that 50.9% of students did worse than I did.
Bio: 20
GChem: 23
OChem: 19
RC: 20
QR: 16!😱
PAT: 19
TS: 21
AA: 20
Should I schedule to retake the test in November? I'm pleased with my AA score, but I'm afraid that a 16 in any section will throw me into the auto-reject pile. I don't have a good GPA to back my scores (though I'm in grad school now with a 4.0👍) Do you think that sending my very-good GRE scores to schools would keep me out of the bad-at-math reject pile without retaking the DAT? My application is going to 17 schools, but I think I might add more after this disappointing performance.
