DAT Study Materials 2021

[alexandraz]

Hello,

My name is Alexandra and I am in a Post Baccalaureate Pre-Health Program at CSU San Marcos and I am applying to dental school this cycle. I have been in the Air Force for 12 years in the medical and dental field. My undergraduate GPA is a 3.56 and in my postbacc I'm currently at a 3.7 and my science GPA is a 3.65.
I am looking for a more recent thread for recent recommendations for DAT study material. I am planning on taking my DAT in June and have purchased the DAT Destroyer. I want to make the most of my money because I can probably only afford one of the $1k programs. I am looking at DAT Bootcamp, Kaplan, The Princeton Review, Crack the Dat or DAT Booster. I would like an all around program that will have a lot of videos and helpful explanations. I feel like so many reviews from people say different ones worked best for them(which make sense because we all learn differenlty). I am just a pre-dental student looking for some feedback from recent DAT test takers. Thank you for reading and taking your time to respond to my post.

If you have taken the DAT in the last 5 years can you let me know which review worked best for you and which ones you purchased?
If you can please put the year you took the DAT and AA or each sections score?
If you purchased multiple programs if you could rank them best #1 to worst and so on and so forth. If you highly recommend one if you can comment below which one you recommend I would greatly appreciate it. I look forward to having some more recent feedback for myself and other students.
1. Best
2. Second Best

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[artist2022]

I think rather than having people write a review here, essentially, it might be better for you to read through breakdowns from recent test takers and see why they liked/didn't like certain programs and go from there. This thread has breakdowns ordered by score and they are color coded based on year: Compilation - DAT Breakdown Collection! 2017-Present

 

[0Mik3cho]

For what it's worth, among the high scorers here, most follow a self-study plan rather than a class-based program. But there may be a selection bias where SDNers generally uses the same resources (Destroyer, Bootcamp, Booster) because everyone else here uses them. It may be worthwhile to check with your school's pre-dent club and see the resources non-SDNers might be using.

 

[RyuTatum]

If you have taken the DAT in the last 5 years can you let me know which review worked best for you and which ones you purchased?

• For review, DATBooster was the easily the best. It had really good videos for all the sections and pretty much covered everything taught on the DAT
• I primarily used DATBooster and a little bit of DATDestroyer and DATBootcamp. All 3 are good and have their strengths/weaknesses

If you can please put the year you took the DAT and AA or each sections score?

• 27 AA in December 2020

If you purchased multiple programs if you could rank them best #1 to worst and so on and so forth. If you highly recommend one if you can comment below which one you recommend I would greatly appreciate it. I look forward to having some more recent feedback for myself and other students.

• Here is my ranking:

1. DATBooster - easily the best, was very representative (had similar/identical questions on my real exam) and covered everything on the DAT
2. DATDestroyer - was difficult to go through and so it made the DAT easy
3. DATBootcamp - good resource but overpriced and was not representative

 

[Abbasr2000]

What I think is that you should really only stick to one or two good resources, make sure to use them completely and it should help you do very well. The best resource in my opinion is DATBooster as it has the most representative questions in the Dat, they also have these new biology notes which look very helpful. The most important thing for prepping for this exam is having representative questions and I think that DATBooster does a very good job on that. If you need more practice pick up the dat destroyer but keep in mind that the questions in that are very difficult. Follow feralis’s schedule on DATBooster if you want to use both he does a good job incorporating them both into a short timeframe.

 

[ChemistryDentist]

Agreed on reading through some of the breakdowns on SDN and elsewhere to get a feel for people's study style because you said it yourself: everyone is different.

That being said, most people who use the DAT Destroyer and accompanying material (Math Destroyer + free Bio Review + free YouTube videos) end up doing well plus or minus other resources. This seems to be always true, at minimum from when I took it in 2019 until now and into the future. It worked for me, and if you can work through them and really take as much as you can away from them, it should work for you or anyone else.

Beyond that, you'll hear pretty much the same from anyone you ask. You really need to find out what works best for you and work at a pace that is best for you. I'd utilize as many low-priced and free resources as you can, because applications are expensive and you'll want to save money for that.

Best of luck!