Background: I’m not a traditional applicant to dental school, I’ve graduated right at the start of the year majoring in bio. It took me a sec to decide on what I wanted to do with my career. I’ve bene bouncing around a bit in science and finally decided on dentistry. I took some time to explore what it really consisted of before starting on studying on April 12th.
Materials:
DATBooster, Hands down the best resource I’ve used, they truly give you everything you need. If you ever have a problem with anything from the site or just confused about a question of concept, they are always willing to help. They usually get back within a couple hours at most too.
Chads Prep, for chemistry which I was struggling with chads was so helpful. Honestly wish I used these in my chem classes so I wouldn’t have done so bad.
DATBooster Crash Courses, I took bio 1-3 and chem 3, the bio-ones were truly amazing Dr. Sohraby gives you so much information that is likely to be asked on the exam. Some of my questions were pulled word for word from what he asked us. For the Chem it was still useful however I only took part 3 (thermochem and acids and bases) so I can’t say much on the overall crash course.
ANKI, I see the appeal overall, the spaced reptation really hammers things into your head but it just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t bring myself to sit there and just go through flashcards. I downloaded the phone app too but doing it there didn’t help. I used anki for about 3 weeks before I stopped. This software would most likely be much more useful if you made the cards yourself, however the booster decks have too much information and I didn’t find it useful, at least for bio.
My study schedule was basically using the 12-week booster schedule for their first content learning part and then after I had gone thru all the content, I used my own schedule. How I planned it all out was that I had only taken 2 of the 10 practice tests by the time I had reviewed the content. From then I spaced out the remaining exams for the 6 weeks I had remaining. During this time, I was constantly reviewing my notes and those provided by booster while doing any of the associated questions I didn’t already complete or redo for those I had. I scheduled this in order from earliest learned too latest. Here is also when I would go over the. Cheat sheets for bio. In the last month I was basically taking a full-length practice test every 3-4 days until I ran out of them. My final two weeks were set up so that in the first week I would take the remaining 2 practice tests with about 2 days between them to rest and review. The end of that week and the final week I redid all the exams for the individual science sections, bio chem, and orgo. (I could have done math as well and I’m kicking myself for not as my score reflects on that.) The day before the last day I reviewed my notes from the crash courses and was finishing off retaking those exams and for the final day I just rested and spent the day with my grandparents.
I highly recommend retaking the exams for the science sections. When I was doing my practice exams in booster, I always did the timed exams. For the first two times I took the section exams individually but timed. From the third practice exam onwards, I did the full-length practice exams. (From the fourth time taking the exams, I had already scheduled my exam date so I knew the exact time the real exam would start so I would take the practice full length at that time to prepare myself mentally.) By taking only the timed exams the untimed exams were all ready to take. Obviously as you have seen and reviewed the content before it’s going to be easy, you should be scoring 20-30 on these (maybe not the first few as it has been a while). But the point is to familiarize yourself with the most representative practice problems to know what types of problems to expect for the exam.
Another thing to note is you need to take breaks and have motivators. Studying for four months can be daunting because frankly it is. It takes a lot to dedicate yourself to anything for that long of a time period. Even though everyone here reading this already knows why they’re putting themselves through this it’s very easy to get off sight and get lazy with it. The best way is to take breaks whether it’s seeing your family, going to the park or the city for a weekend, or just a good time with friends, try to take a decent day off at least once every week. In addition, you don’t need to study all day as well. I had things set out that I wanted to get done that day, if I finished, I took the rest of the day to myself. Sometimes I didn’t finish in those cases I kept working until I did or had to do it the next day or I would mid-day breaks. I was also shadowing for the first 3 months twice a week. When I got back from shadowing id be exhausted from standing up all day, so I took the night off studying. Another thing, I read this last point on another DAT breakdown, in order to motivate them putting off the exam they booked themselves tickets to Taylor Swift for the night of the exam. Doing so for the duration of their study they were able to look forward to the concert whenever they were feeling down and get back to the grind. I did this same thing booking a flight back home for the day after my exam so I could see all my friends and family for a bit afterwards. Any time I was down with studying I was able to tell myself I’m doing this right afterwards, coupling taking the DAT with what I wanted to do. I highly recommend doing so, its like coupling endergonic and exergonic reactions together so that one motivates you for the grind and vice versa.
Bio (30), Honestly the questions were very straightforward compared to some of the questions I saw on the booster bio question banks, less so for the exams which seemed a lot more representative of the questions I received. People say biology is all about memorization, but don’t treat it as just memorization for the sake of memorization, each topic is a system and think about how each fact is related to the big picture. (For example, the left ventricle has the thickest walls of the heart, don’t just know that know why it has the thickest wall of the heart.) If you can treat each question you encounter in this manner the systems of biology will be intuitive. And if the systems are intuitive then the little details will also come easily as well. Again, some of the questions were word for word pulled from Dr. Sohraby’s bio crash course so if you have the opportunity id 100% recommend it. How I went about learning these systems was that first I would take the full notes document and read it and make my own notes from that document. These were really long notes and took a lot of time to write out, however I wanted to include every detail on content I could so I could guarantee to myself any question I saw I should know as I had already written it down. Writing something down really helps me memorize things, it’s a lot more active of a learning method than just typing it out or reading notes given to you. I try to always put words in concepts into a simpler form so as I’m rereading what I wrote it feels like I am just talking to myself. From there I would take the associated bio questions as I finished each chapter. I would do every other question the first time and when I got onto the second phase of the schedule and was reviewing the content and the cheat sheets, I did the remaining half. In the actual exam nothing threw me off except for ones I did not have memorized. For example, there was this one regarding decomposers in the carbon cycle, for that I was able to take an educated guess.
Chem (24), Chemistry was never really a strong suit of mine, I think buffers legitimately only clicked for me a week and half ago. The chem notes that booster gives you are really intuitive and teach you a lot of the fundamentals. What really helped was watching chads prep on youtube. He really is an amazing teacher and his older chem vids when they were recorded in a classroom just feel better to me to learn from. Any time I didn’t understand a topic I would watch chads video on it. For some I had to rewatch a few times (acids and bases smh) until it finally clicked. My exam did not really have too many calculations but there was a fair amount in. The numbers you’re asked to deal with are a lot easier than booster and sometimes they give you the answer choices in the formula form, so you just have to know where everything plugs in. Make sure you have a good knowledge of the fundamentals of chemistry more so than the math, they don’t really ask you any out their questions from my experience you either know the process or you don’t.
Orgo (30), I was kind of scared as I hadn’t done any orgo since before covid, however the exam does not test you on knowing the full pathway of a reaction or retrosynthesis which in my opinion was the hardest part of orgo when I took it in school. My method for orgo was just rote memorization of reagents and how the react. Once I finished my initial content review and I was redoing the booster orgo chapter questions I wrote out each question and the answer and a little blurb under each one saying what happened in the reaction. (For example, I’d draw the alkene and BH3 THF HOOH on the arrow. I’d say under, hydroboration oxidation uses BH3, THF, and peroxide and we get an alcohol, its anti-markovnikov because of the peroxide.) I’d do this for every question even the simplest ones or if I got the same concept tested 5 questions in a row. You can already see the theme of written repetition throughout my studying, but I truly believe it helps internalize what you want into your brain compared to typing or just reading. I also printed the booster orgo reaction sheet and taped the pages to my wall behind the desk so I could quickly look up and get a reference on a reaction. This method is not foolproof because on actual D-day you could be tested on something you haven’t seen or just forgot. Make sure you understand how electrons move during a reaction so that you can reason your way through a reaction if needed. For the actual test questions, I would say the booster exams prepare you adequately. There is a good amount of ranking of stability and by acidity so make sure you understand those concepts intuitively. There were a couple of what I would call acid base problems. Basically, they look similar enough to a reaction that you would think they react however it is just a proton transfer as the two reagents are an acid and base. On booster there is a secret set of orgo questions that aren’t available normally. In the intercom feature there is a list of all their old announcements in one of them they say that they have just updated their orgo question bank to be more representative, however if you can still access the old ones using the links provided. Like they said they are not as representative as the new ones however I feel in this case the more exposure the better.
PAT (25), The puzzles were in similar difficulty to those on the practice tests of datbooster, however I did see a lot more curved keyholes than I expected. I know on booster they prepare you for “rock keyholes”, I also got a rock on the top front-end section but compared to a keyhole it’s easier to analyze and solve. For the angle ranking many of mine had answer choices that were completely randomized so you could not compare between two angles to see which is smaller/larger and narrow down answer choices. For my hole punching section, it’s just like on booster nothing was remarkable here. Cube counting was a similar situation, only thing was one of the towers was shown at a different angle than I saw in booster or the other questions on that section. For the pattern folding, mine was a lot simpler in patterns than I had come to expect, so. I was able to breeze through them easily. The only way to get better at PAT is to just do them every day. I would do at least 15 of each section every day, eventually for the hard ones (TFE, Keyholes, and Pattern Folding), they just click. By constantly doing them you’ll notice tricks and shortcuts that you just weren’t comprehending mentally, and you’ll go back, and it will be all easier. In addition, you except for the angles and hole punching generator on booster I wouldn’t bother after your getting them mostly right. The angles set it to a 3-degree difference and for the hole punching set it to insane mode so for the actual DAT you’re not thrown off. The cube generator is good, but they don’t have any tricky visual cases, here is where the practice exams come in. For the keyholes, TFE, and pattern folding the best thing is the question banks, I discovered them kind of late, so I was pushing 30 of each a day. But the point is to expose yourself enough that you pick up tricks and it all just clicks.
Reading (26), I love reading, mostly fiction but reading is reading at the end of the day and the speed and ease in which you’re able to comprehend these passages is mostly based on how much you read. For this I ended up redeeming the 3 months of apple news plus they give you as I figured these magazine articles would be the type of passages I would receive, and just to keep myself reading. My strategy for the questions was to read until I found my answer. If the next question related to something I already read, then perfect answer it and keep going. If not, then keep reading until I found it. Something I did was even when I knew the answer to a question I would scroll to where it was and verify it within the text as the DAT loves to have trick questions. (For example, what are the common symptoms of X? one of the answer choices would list all the symptoms except one which would sound similar enough that you would pick it if you read to fast). Booster does well on these type of trick questions in their own practice tests. One thing I can’t stress enough is don’t overthink a question, usually for these authors purpose or synonym or tone questions there is some ambiguity, and you can usually reason yourself into two of the 4 being equally correct depending on how you reason through it. For these just go with your gut, it’s not worth it. Its al lot better to have the time to review the rest of your answers.
Math (21), This was the most disappointing part of the exam for me, I have never really had a strong math base, but I had consistently scored with only 2-5 wrong on the practice tests from booster, so I was surprised by this. My exam had some tricky questions, some with probability some where the functions were represented graphically, and you had to solve for a variable of the combined functions. It was a bit more tedious on the calculations I feel like and that caused me to run out of time on this section so I couldn’t go back and check my work. Otherwise, booster does a good job of representing this portion. My only regret here is I didn’t go back and redo the QR exams like I did the science ones, if I had id most likely have been better prepared for these weird questions. Otherwise, my advice is to be quick on recognizing what you are asked to do in each question as you don’t have too much time to dedicate to each. In addition, they did give me conversions when I was asked so don’t worry too much on that.
To end it all off my final advice to give to anyone taking the DAT soon is that it really isn’t much. In my opinion standardized tests all ask do you have the ability to put in the effort to learn what we ask of you, regardless of it showing your actual aptitude. Most of this probably won’t be useful in dental school and beyond (except for that angles section if you’re in ortho lmao), so don’t let it define you. Study well enough that even before you take the test you know you’ll receive a score you can be proud of. If not learn from your mistakes and take it again. I set of taking the DAT hoping committing myself to this would make me a better student when the time comes for dental school as I definitely wasn’t before. Good Luck!
Materials:
DATBooster, Hands down the best resource I’ve used, they truly give you everything you need. If you ever have a problem with anything from the site or just confused about a question of concept, they are always willing to help. They usually get back within a couple hours at most too.
Chads Prep, for chemistry which I was struggling with chads was so helpful. Honestly wish I used these in my chem classes so I wouldn’t have done so bad.
DATBooster Crash Courses, I took bio 1-3 and chem 3, the bio-ones were truly amazing Dr. Sohraby gives you so much information that is likely to be asked on the exam. Some of my questions were pulled word for word from what he asked us. For the Chem it was still useful however I only took part 3 (thermochem and acids and bases) so I can’t say much on the overall crash course.
ANKI, I see the appeal overall, the spaced reptation really hammers things into your head but it just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t bring myself to sit there and just go through flashcards. I downloaded the phone app too but doing it there didn’t help. I used anki for about 3 weeks before I stopped. This software would most likely be much more useful if you made the cards yourself, however the booster decks have too much information and I didn’t find it useful, at least for bio.
My study schedule was basically using the 12-week booster schedule for their first content learning part and then after I had gone thru all the content, I used my own schedule. How I planned it all out was that I had only taken 2 of the 10 practice tests by the time I had reviewed the content. From then I spaced out the remaining exams for the 6 weeks I had remaining. During this time, I was constantly reviewing my notes and those provided by booster while doing any of the associated questions I didn’t already complete or redo for those I had. I scheduled this in order from earliest learned too latest. Here is also when I would go over the. Cheat sheets for bio. In the last month I was basically taking a full-length practice test every 3-4 days until I ran out of them. My final two weeks were set up so that in the first week I would take the remaining 2 practice tests with about 2 days between them to rest and review. The end of that week and the final week I redid all the exams for the individual science sections, bio chem, and orgo. (I could have done math as well and I’m kicking myself for not as my score reflects on that.) The day before the last day I reviewed my notes from the crash courses and was finishing off retaking those exams and for the final day I just rested and spent the day with my grandparents.
I highly recommend retaking the exams for the science sections. When I was doing my practice exams in booster, I always did the timed exams. For the first two times I took the section exams individually but timed. From the third practice exam onwards, I did the full-length practice exams. (From the fourth time taking the exams, I had already scheduled my exam date so I knew the exact time the real exam would start so I would take the practice full length at that time to prepare myself mentally.) By taking only the timed exams the untimed exams were all ready to take. Obviously as you have seen and reviewed the content before it’s going to be easy, you should be scoring 20-30 on these (maybe not the first few as it has been a while). But the point is to familiarize yourself with the most representative practice problems to know what types of problems to expect for the exam.
Another thing to note is you need to take breaks and have motivators. Studying for four months can be daunting because frankly it is. It takes a lot to dedicate yourself to anything for that long of a time period. Even though everyone here reading this already knows why they’re putting themselves through this it’s very easy to get off sight and get lazy with it. The best way is to take breaks whether it’s seeing your family, going to the park or the city for a weekend, or just a good time with friends, try to take a decent day off at least once every week. In addition, you don’t need to study all day as well. I had things set out that I wanted to get done that day, if I finished, I took the rest of the day to myself. Sometimes I didn’t finish in those cases I kept working until I did or had to do it the next day or I would mid-day breaks. I was also shadowing for the first 3 months twice a week. When I got back from shadowing id be exhausted from standing up all day, so I took the night off studying. Another thing, I read this last point on another DAT breakdown, in order to motivate them putting off the exam they booked themselves tickets to Taylor Swift for the night of the exam. Doing so for the duration of their study they were able to look forward to the concert whenever they were feeling down and get back to the grind. I did this same thing booking a flight back home for the day after my exam so I could see all my friends and family for a bit afterwards. Any time I was down with studying I was able to tell myself I’m doing this right afterwards, coupling taking the DAT with what I wanted to do. I highly recommend doing so, its like coupling endergonic and exergonic reactions together so that one motivates you for the grind and vice versa.
Bio (30), Honestly the questions were very straightforward compared to some of the questions I saw on the booster bio question banks, less so for the exams which seemed a lot more representative of the questions I received. People say biology is all about memorization, but don’t treat it as just memorization for the sake of memorization, each topic is a system and think about how each fact is related to the big picture. (For example, the left ventricle has the thickest walls of the heart, don’t just know that know why it has the thickest wall of the heart.) If you can treat each question you encounter in this manner the systems of biology will be intuitive. And if the systems are intuitive then the little details will also come easily as well. Again, some of the questions were word for word pulled from Dr. Sohraby’s bio crash course so if you have the opportunity id 100% recommend it. How I went about learning these systems was that first I would take the full notes document and read it and make my own notes from that document. These were really long notes and took a lot of time to write out, however I wanted to include every detail on content I could so I could guarantee to myself any question I saw I should know as I had already written it down. Writing something down really helps me memorize things, it’s a lot more active of a learning method than just typing it out or reading notes given to you. I try to always put words in concepts into a simpler form so as I’m rereading what I wrote it feels like I am just talking to myself. From there I would take the associated bio questions as I finished each chapter. I would do every other question the first time and when I got onto the second phase of the schedule and was reviewing the content and the cheat sheets, I did the remaining half. In the actual exam nothing threw me off except for ones I did not have memorized. For example, there was this one regarding decomposers in the carbon cycle, for that I was able to take an educated guess.
Chem (24), Chemistry was never really a strong suit of mine, I think buffers legitimately only clicked for me a week and half ago. The chem notes that booster gives you are really intuitive and teach you a lot of the fundamentals. What really helped was watching chads prep on youtube. He really is an amazing teacher and his older chem vids when they were recorded in a classroom just feel better to me to learn from. Any time I didn’t understand a topic I would watch chads video on it. For some I had to rewatch a few times (acids and bases smh) until it finally clicked. My exam did not really have too many calculations but there was a fair amount in. The numbers you’re asked to deal with are a lot easier than booster and sometimes they give you the answer choices in the formula form, so you just have to know where everything plugs in. Make sure you have a good knowledge of the fundamentals of chemistry more so than the math, they don’t really ask you any out their questions from my experience you either know the process or you don’t.
Orgo (30), I was kind of scared as I hadn’t done any orgo since before covid, however the exam does not test you on knowing the full pathway of a reaction or retrosynthesis which in my opinion was the hardest part of orgo when I took it in school. My method for orgo was just rote memorization of reagents and how the react. Once I finished my initial content review and I was redoing the booster orgo chapter questions I wrote out each question and the answer and a little blurb under each one saying what happened in the reaction. (For example, I’d draw the alkene and BH3 THF HOOH on the arrow. I’d say under, hydroboration oxidation uses BH3, THF, and peroxide and we get an alcohol, its anti-markovnikov because of the peroxide.) I’d do this for every question even the simplest ones or if I got the same concept tested 5 questions in a row. You can already see the theme of written repetition throughout my studying, but I truly believe it helps internalize what you want into your brain compared to typing or just reading. I also printed the booster orgo reaction sheet and taped the pages to my wall behind the desk so I could quickly look up and get a reference on a reaction. This method is not foolproof because on actual D-day you could be tested on something you haven’t seen or just forgot. Make sure you understand how electrons move during a reaction so that you can reason your way through a reaction if needed. For the actual test questions, I would say the booster exams prepare you adequately. There is a good amount of ranking of stability and by acidity so make sure you understand those concepts intuitively. There were a couple of what I would call acid base problems. Basically, they look similar enough to a reaction that you would think they react however it is just a proton transfer as the two reagents are an acid and base. On booster there is a secret set of orgo questions that aren’t available normally. In the intercom feature there is a list of all their old announcements in one of them they say that they have just updated their orgo question bank to be more representative, however if you can still access the old ones using the links provided. Like they said they are not as representative as the new ones however I feel in this case the more exposure the better.
PAT (25), The puzzles were in similar difficulty to those on the practice tests of datbooster, however I did see a lot more curved keyholes than I expected. I know on booster they prepare you for “rock keyholes”, I also got a rock on the top front-end section but compared to a keyhole it’s easier to analyze and solve. For the angle ranking many of mine had answer choices that were completely randomized so you could not compare between two angles to see which is smaller/larger and narrow down answer choices. For my hole punching section, it’s just like on booster nothing was remarkable here. Cube counting was a similar situation, only thing was one of the towers was shown at a different angle than I saw in booster or the other questions on that section. For the pattern folding, mine was a lot simpler in patterns than I had come to expect, so. I was able to breeze through them easily. The only way to get better at PAT is to just do them every day. I would do at least 15 of each section every day, eventually for the hard ones (TFE, Keyholes, and Pattern Folding), they just click. By constantly doing them you’ll notice tricks and shortcuts that you just weren’t comprehending mentally, and you’ll go back, and it will be all easier. In addition, you except for the angles and hole punching generator on booster I wouldn’t bother after your getting them mostly right. The angles set it to a 3-degree difference and for the hole punching set it to insane mode so for the actual DAT you’re not thrown off. The cube generator is good, but they don’t have any tricky visual cases, here is where the practice exams come in. For the keyholes, TFE, and pattern folding the best thing is the question banks, I discovered them kind of late, so I was pushing 30 of each a day. But the point is to expose yourself enough that you pick up tricks and it all just clicks.
Reading (26), I love reading, mostly fiction but reading is reading at the end of the day and the speed and ease in which you’re able to comprehend these passages is mostly based on how much you read. For this I ended up redeeming the 3 months of apple news plus they give you as I figured these magazine articles would be the type of passages I would receive, and just to keep myself reading. My strategy for the questions was to read until I found my answer. If the next question related to something I already read, then perfect answer it and keep going. If not, then keep reading until I found it. Something I did was even when I knew the answer to a question I would scroll to where it was and verify it within the text as the DAT loves to have trick questions. (For example, what are the common symptoms of X? one of the answer choices would list all the symptoms except one which would sound similar enough that you would pick it if you read to fast). Booster does well on these type of trick questions in their own practice tests. One thing I can’t stress enough is don’t overthink a question, usually for these authors purpose or synonym or tone questions there is some ambiguity, and you can usually reason yourself into two of the 4 being equally correct depending on how you reason through it. For these just go with your gut, it’s not worth it. Its al lot better to have the time to review the rest of your answers.
Math (21), This was the most disappointing part of the exam for me, I have never really had a strong math base, but I had consistently scored with only 2-5 wrong on the practice tests from booster, so I was surprised by this. My exam had some tricky questions, some with probability some where the functions were represented graphically, and you had to solve for a variable of the combined functions. It was a bit more tedious on the calculations I feel like and that caused me to run out of time on this section so I couldn’t go back and check my work. Otherwise, booster does a good job of representing this portion. My only regret here is I didn’t go back and redo the QR exams like I did the science ones, if I had id most likely have been better prepared for these weird questions. Otherwise, my advice is to be quick on recognizing what you are asked to do in each question as you don’t have too much time to dedicate to each. In addition, they did give me conversions when I was asked so don’t worry too much on that.
To end it all off my final advice to give to anyone taking the DAT soon is that it really isn’t much. In my opinion standardized tests all ask do you have the ability to put in the effort to learn what we ask of you, regardless of it showing your actual aptitude. Most of this probably won’t be useful in dental school and beyond (except for that angles section if you’re in ortho lmao), so don’t let it define you. Study well enough that even before you take the test you know you’ll receive a score you can be proud of. If not learn from your mistakes and take it again. I set of taking the DAT hoping committing myself to this would make me a better student when the time comes for dental school as I definitely wasn’t before. Good Luck!
