lintydent said:
hey those are awesome scores....not everyone on sdn is an over achiever.
well, in keeping tradition, do you have any helpful tips? do you remember any of the questions? how did you prepare....and what did you think of each section? since your RC score is pretty nice, did you do skimming reading the first line of each paragraph?
I began studying in the beginning of June, and probably averaged 5-7 hours a week. I stepped it up in the 2 weeks before my test to about 10-15 hours a week.
The best two pieces of advice I can offer are:
- Get good sleep the night before the test, eat a good breakfast, and take a lot of deep breaths.
- Use the MARK function whenever you don't know the answer or aren't 90% sure you're correct. (Always put a "guess" answer on questions you mark in case you run out of time).
As far as questions, I don't remember any verbatim. All I can offer is know the following: Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, various phyla/classes (ie Chordata) and their associated characteristics, acid/base equilibria and conversion to pH, SN1/SN2/E1/E2, atomic/ionic radius. That's really all I can remember (my brain is so fried!).
The
natural sciences section was much easier than I thought it would be. The
PAT angle ranking exercises were a lot more difficult that I thought they would be. As far as the cubes, I used the
"cube-counting" method described in the Kaplan book, which gave me more time on other sections. There weren't many
pattern folding exercises with pictures on the faces of the paper - it was mostly "what 3-D shape would this paper turn in to" type questions. Does that make sense? It's hard to explain.
Paper folding was about what I expected, as was
top-front-end.
QR was more difficult than I anticipated. There were many word problems (I struggle with those). There was also a C/F degree conversion and some difficult square root/exponent problems.
RC: unless you have awesome recall skills, I would NOT read the passages before starting the questions. Use your scratch paper to make a basic outline. The paragraphs are numbered on the actual DAT, so number them accordingly on your outline. Refer to it to find the answers in the passage. For questions that you don't have a clue about and cannot immediately remember where to find the answer, use the "mark" function and get the easier questions first.
I hope this helps! Good luck
