- Joined
- Jun 3, 2012
- Messages
- 100
- Reaction score
- 37
in case the picture doesn't show up.
PAT 20 (79%)
QR 21 (96.4%)
RC 22 (84.4%)
BIO 28 (99.7%)
GC 23 (95.4%)
OC 25 (95.8%)
TS 25 (99.6%)
AA 24 (99.5)
Despite the fact that summer should be fun and relaxing, my summer was quite the opposite, but in the end, I believe it was all worth it. (now my greatest fear is the testing center notifying me that the scores were misgraded.. does that happen?) This is my first post on SDN. I must admit, I have been the ultimate SDN creeper, reading everyone's DAT breakdowns. I apologize in advance for such a long breakdown!
intelligence background i will be a 3rd year at Emory in the upcoming fall. I finished all the 4 basic pre-reqs, nothing higher. biology and gchem were from freshmen year so i needed major review. i had just taken ochem, so definitely more fresh. i have never studied so hard for anything. my parents label me as the lazy one so my mom was always in shock watching me study, but i definitely needed to. i am clumsy and tend to make stupid mistakes. my older brothers took all the smart genes so definitely needed to crank it.
study time: total ~190 hours. I started around mid May until test day. Around May/June, I did around 4-7 hours a day. I also took one weekend break and travelled. July was more 6 - 9 hours a day.
activities during study time: working part time (15-17hr/week) and volunteer at a dental clinic (6 hr/week)
study materials
DAT destroyer
Kaplan blue book
Crack DAT PAT
Chad's videos
Cliff's AP bio
Topscore
flashcards (anki & cue cards)
random free online quizzes
exam cracker 1001 questions for gchem and ochem ( i only did 1/3 of them. the questions aren't really that similar to the DAT but good prep learning)
free practice tests sets, like 2007 ADA & OAT sample
DAT flashcard app on droid https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bh.superflashcard.dat.android&hl=en
study buddy (we quizzed each other over texts all the time. best thing ever! ill be your quizzing buddy too! )
study schedule
I didn't have a schedule. I was never the structured type. I knew that if I tried to stick to a strict schedule, (ex. from 9am - 10 am ill do bio), I knew I could never follow through. Knowing that about myself, I knew I needed something else to ensure that I had quality studying. so my goal for each day was simple, to do 1-2 hours of each science topic. it didn't matter when I did it, just as long as I did it. However, I ran into another problem. I ended each day of studying with feeling of incompleteness, anxiety and incompetence. I knew that I had studied but I needed a quantitative way to keep track. So i started doing something like this..
study style
I got bored just plain studying. I learned human physiology through the kaplan reviews, youtube videos (i wanna marry you Khan academy) but it's honestly so so boring to just read the biology/chemistry books. plus, I wasn't sure if I had truly understood the material. I also know that I SUCK at multiple choice problems. I second guess myself. I try to figure out the "psychology" of the choice answers given which all ends up screwing me over. so especially for biology, I took as many quizzes as I can find. the basic process was: learn & quiz. review the quiz & learn & take more quizzes. I must have done +3000 problems. I made sure I did practice problems everyday all day. you will also see that, i retook a lot of the DATqvault, I didn't retake these tests on the same day. I took them 2 weeks later so that I wasn't answering the questions from memory. also, I tried to make my life revolve around the DAT, for example, when I had to pee, I would ask myself, what part of my body is working? what process does this involve? When I had diarrhea, I thought, hmm large intestine is responsible for water resorption so that part of my body ain't working right now. stuff like that. keep your brain engaged to learning. take breaks when you feel that your mental capacity is going down. since bio was just factual, i used to read alan's note in bus stops, bathrooms, wherever i had small free time.
TopScore digits 1- 2- 3 vs real DAT
BIO 19 - 19 - 18 vs 28
GC 18 - 18 - 19 vs 23
OC 20 - 23 - 19 vs 25
RC 22 - 21 - 23 vs 22
QR 21 - 21 - 23 vs 21
TS 19 - 20 - 19 vs 25
AA 20 - 20 - 20 vs 24
Crack DAT PAT #1 - # 8
16 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 24 - 22 - 22 - 22
CRACK DAT PAT #1 - #6, (taking it second time)
21 - 22 - 22- 20 - n/a- 30
PAT studying style
I wouldn't PAT myself on the back for the 20. I didn't take all 10 tests, but I did re-take most of the tests. PAT is nothing academically related. I think it's more of a procedural memory. it's similar to riding a bike. it's learning how to visualize things at different angles through various visual tasks. so I didn't start the PAT until a month before my DAT. I believe that the reviewing process is the more important than practicing taking so many tests. for example, for the aperture passing, I asked myself, what does the front, top, side look like? picture it in your head. then look at the answer. don't base your answers on the choices you see. for pattern folding, I just replayed the folding 3-4 times. even if I didn't understand it, it's visual information that your brain processes and during sleep, it will consolidate those visual data that you had played. it's a procedural thing.
DATqvault () = taking it for non-first time
BIO 18 (23, 20, 29, 27, 27)- 18 (29, 27) - 15 (29, 22, 20,22) - 17 (27, 29, 22) - 18 (27, 23) - 22 (27) - 19 (18, 29) - 19 (27, 23) - 19 (22) - 20 (23)
GC 20 (24,30) - 22 (22) - 22 (24) - 29 - 22 - 20 - 20 - 20 - 20 - 20
OC 14 (21 - 29) - 19 (29) - 19 (29) - 19(23) - 17 (19, 21) - 20 (25) - 19 (19) - 23 (29) - 23 (20) - 20
QR 20 - 17 - 21 - 20 - 19 - 21 - 23 - 26 - 21 - 22
RC 22 - 22 - 20 (only did three cause I was lazy)
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now the real thanggg.
BIO 28
Kaplan blue book - this was the book i started with. general review. good intro to human physiology stuff, as this was totally new to me.
AP Cliff bio- I must have read this 3-4 times. I did their quizzes twice. their plant section is really specific. the only way i learned them was through flashcards. i could care less about dicots and monocots.
Alan's biology notes nice and concise. somethings seemed outdated so i made some edits of my own.
DATqVAULT this is so worth the money. 10 test for all sciences, reading, and math for $100. i'lll take it. I did those when I got sick of reading.
DAT Destroyer - I did 40 questions at a time, like the real DAT. I went over it at least three times. I also downloaded anki, which is this awesome flashcard system. on the real DAT, there were 3-4 questions that were strangely similar to the destroyer. hmmm. weird. but it helped me! haha. their explanation is really nice and helpful.
*on the real thing, I had marked about 10 questions. Biology had always been my lowest so I was pleasantly surprised. lucky guess or the computer messed up? compared to the online quizzes and top score, the real DAT questions are less specific. they're more general. don't let topscore depress you like it did to me! topscore has these taxonomy questions that's not indicative of the real DAT. on the real DAT, they have more application based questions; they'll give you an observation and ask what you can conclude about this observation. I am gonna use diarrhea as an example, the question may ask, if clair had diarrhea what can you conclude about her digestive system?
free study materials of biology
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/cla...64631&alaid=ala_661088&showSelfStudyTree=true
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0073031208/student_view0/
http://www.flashcardexchange.com/tag/dat
GC 23 & OC 25
- chad's video and quizzes - I love this man. I wanna marry him. I think he's bald because all these amazing knowledge in his head pushed all his hair out. I didn't do so hot on gchem in my college and I've always hated (and still hate gchem). Orgo was amazing in my college and it was still fresh in my head. The best thing about chad is that he tells you what kinds of questions you should anticipate. I did his quizzes 3-4 times.
- DAT destroyer. such good practice even though I felt like a complete ******* when I went through it the first time. I almost always missed 50 - 75% of the questions. i'd be like.. WTF. I thought i knew this material *depression* . anyways, destroyer is sneaky like Ninja. I went through the gchem & orgo portion 4-5x by the 5th time, I could tell why that was the answer and why the rest of them weren't the answer. Destroyer, you were reall difficult for me to love, but at the end, I figured you out mothaflockaa!
- DATqvault more practice. more knowledge. I also supplemented the Chad videos by doing the qvault quizzes as well.
**on the real thing, the only worry i had about gchem was that i would mess up on the math, but so much easier than destroyer, quite similar to datqvault.the stoichiometry on the real thing is easier than datqvault. same with orgo. a lot of reactions but very straightforward. destroyer's reaction map is awesome but i think you can still do well even if you hadn't memorized the reaction map.
free study materials of gchem/ochem
http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_mcmurry_chemistry_5/73/18712/4790506.cw/index.html
http://www.brookscole.com/cgi-wadsw...t_isbn_issn=9780534389994&disciplinenumber=12
http://glencoe.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0078664187/student_view0/self-check_quizzes.html (my personal favorite! )
RC 21 & QR 22
- I didn't do much for reading. I am generally a fast reader cause I am impatient. I used the "search and destroy" tactic. I had some reading about ethics, fungal infections, and epithelial-mysenchymal tooth things. the reading isn't as high as I wanted even though I found the real thing easier. I had 20 minutes left after I was done. there were few tone questions but generally easy. it also helped that the reading was interesting.
- for QR, i practiced a lot. I always felt like a ******* with the destroyer, but my problems were usually with probability, geometry, trigonometry, and finances. DATqVAULT was my main homedawg. I still don't fully understand probability but the probability questions on the DAT were doable. similar to TopScore. also, i must say, I love using the calculator. **on the real thing, I had no time to double check, but I had marked 5-7 questions.
PAT 20
this is my lowest score booo.
keyholes: a bit harder than proportion cause DAT has an emphasis on proportions. for the questions I marked, I would trace the outlines of the figure given so that I wouldn't miss the humps and zig zags and what nots.
TFE: umm.. not much reliance on the line counting method as compared to CDP. what helped me was knowing where the solids and dotted lines go. also i feel like you develop some gut feeling after you do so many CDP.
angles: i feel like CDP was harder but for the obtuse angle, I pretended i was trying to sit on a beach chair and decide which "chair" i had to lean back more. for the really acute angles, i looked for which angle had more "ink." my friend also suggested that for the intermediate angles, to pretend they were bird beaks and decide which one needed to close more. but honestly, i feel like angle is something you have to know within the first 20-30 seconds or you start to second guess yourself. I marked the uncertain ones because when you come back to it, your perspective is more fresh.
cube counting: straightforward. equivalent (or easier) than crack. i just wrote down the numbers of the faces each cubes had. i believe that's the barron method.
pattern folding: oh gawwddd this was my worst section on crack dat pat. i found this section harder than crack dat pat because CDP has more color oriented things. the real DAT had a lot of irregular shapes and i wasn't sure how some of the shapes folded into each other. the classic dice problems were there. whew. i hate you pattern folding. boo.
the week before the test
i took 2 topscores. i took the third topscore 2 days before the test and then i was depressed. i cried cause i felt like i had hit a wall, a wall where my limit was only around 19 - 20. i didn't know how to get over this "limit" and felt stuck. i felt so much pressure and anxiety and all i could hope was for the real test score to be higher than topscore, as i had read on sdn. so if you're reading this now and feel down, dont! i found this TED talk helpful http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html
stress & testing
this is unrelated to the testing material and such, but i feel that it's an important factor of testing. your worries, anxiety, and stress are all inevitable in the studying/testing process. i also find it so useless when people say "don't worry, just relax." nevertheless, i knew that such negativity was affecting my focus but i came to accept it as part of the process. we worry because we understand that we can do better than what we have achieved because we believe in ourselves to achieve something far greater. however, excessive worrying is dwelling on your past. minor worrying is just anticipation of the future. in addition to all the studying and practices, i found it crucial to mediate my stress and anxiety. i stayed sane because i had my study buddy to text/vent and my friends. if you feel like you're going insane, dont hesitate to PM!
practice test is not always truly indicative of your real score! good luck to everyone!!
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