DAT done. Thoughts?
- Thread starter thisisfun
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Welcome to the 22AA blues... I was elated when I first got my scores and have since been starting to feel like a retake is in order. I, too, have a "mediocre" GPA and was really banking on a bang-up DAT score to round out my application. That said, it sounds like you have great ECs and if by mediocre you don't mean sub 3.0, you're probably in a decent spot. Great work, on the whole, you rocked every section and have nothing to be ashamed of. These are fantastic scores that many would take in a heartbeat.
These are AWESOME scores and there are many people who would kill to trade places with you right now. Don't sweat that PAT score. You have an Ivy background and have worked in a dental office, so as long as your GPA isn't awful, I think you are in a GREAT position to be accepted!
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
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Thank you guys both very much.
So you guys would not consider retaking it?
I am hoping that I might be able to attend U. Maryland as an out of stater.
(I have a very good friend who currently attends the school)
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Congrats! You guys are nuts to retake the exam. You scored in the top 1% of the nation, go out and have a drink!
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Great scores! Congratulations, I think you'd be insane for a retake. I can't envision you not getting acceptance with those scores. Go and celebrate your new found freedom!
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great scores!! could you give a quick breakdown of materials you used and those that were most indicative/helpful for the real exam? Also, how many hours a day were you studying?
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First of all, thanks to everyone for making me feel so good and relieved!
It really is quelling my concerns a little bit.
In response to this questions, I really must say that I was able to study maybe about 10-15 hours a week for the last 8 months(only on the weekends basically as I mentioned). I really did not ramp up the studying until after the Thanksgiving probably as well (with adjusting to the new job and everything) The things i used were:
1. Kaplan DAT: which I actually think is quite simple but a good fundamental list of things needed for the test. I went through it taking notes and then reinforcing that with creating index cards for everything that I was not so sure about.
2. DAT Achiever: I bought the 7 test version for the quite a bit of money. My thought going into it was that everything I had ready said it was a good program that was very very hard compared to the actual thing, and so it would help me "step up" my game per se. I think the program is great and polished, but in the end, I do believe that the cost versus its effectiveness is not as great as it could have been with some other programs(Kinda wish I would've spent money on Chad's Videos or DAT destroyer as according to things I'm reading on this forums).
3. The most useful thing that I felt, actually, was a set of MCAT review books that my sister had during her studying before she got into Med School. They had a review book for Biology, Physics and Organic Chemistry. They went into quite a greater detail than the Kaplan DAT book (especially the Biology one), but they sure made me know the sciences forwards and backwards. I can admittedly say that I could've spent more time on test preparation than I did, but that using the method above of continuous writing (on notebooks and index cards many times even for the same things) really gets concepts, reactions and terms into your head. If I felt that I did not quite understand a concept/reaction/term/system, I would always have the internet in front of me and google/wikipedia/college science sites to immediately answer questions/doubts about them. This constant reinforcement I felt really hammered the terms in (considering that I took Orgo during Soph year, and that I was getting 15/16s during my first practice tests in Orgo especially).
4. Videos online on PAT tips. Seriously, They are free, on youtube, random websites and they made real marked improvements to my score.
5. Topscore: Very good/similar level to the real test and great to take leading up to the test (I took one every other day going into the test). The PATs were much easier I felt, or so I thought). I would highly recommend this program to sum up your studying process.
I really saw it in a game theory view because I knew that the things I could control were limited to a few things: Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biology(to a lesser degree), QR.
Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, QR were things that I felt could be tangibly increased with a certain amount of preparation. Biology, on the other hand, if you knew Human biology to a point(which I did with the MCAT books), you could control and answer 90% of what was on the test, but that the other 10% of questions were always just so random and based on chance and luck. based on my limited time (the last 12 days where I basically crammed), I felt that you could invest infinitely in Biology without getting necessarily a 30 while if you knew the concepts and reactions of OC, GC, QR, you could. In the practice tests near the end, I was consistently scoring very high on GC and QR and CR, and that the only ones that I was getting wrong were not because of material I did not know, but just careless errors.
In terms of my test day performance, I had a couple of factors that actually affected my performance. The absolute quietness of the test center actually distracted me(as compared to shows/music that i would study with...silly I know).
My PAT, the biggest disappointment to me if I did not make it clear, was affected because of the tests I took going in. While the DAT PAT's were harder than the Topscore ones, I had been finishing the practice ones with 5-10 minutes left and scoring 22-25. With this in mind, I deliberately went into the test telling myself to slow down to cut down on mistakes, but it backfired when I reached halfway and realized that I had a lot less time left than I expected.
I might have forgotten some details, but let me know if there are any other questions!!
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