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Ladies and Gentlemen, we have yet another successful DAT samurai complete his training and face the DAT. As I prepared for battle, I made sure I carried a delicious snack to ail me during my brief break.
It has been a long and treacherous journey, and much training and precautions were taken prior to my battle today. By purchasing the Kaplan course and topscore materials, I felt prepared to face my opponent after about a month of studying.
My battle wounds:
AA 21 96.6%
PA 18 82.7% (I broke my sword while battling a foe during this one)
QR 20 91.2%
RC 22 91.7%
BIO 21 97.2%
GC 25 98.9% (I had to bust out the hanzo sword on this one)
OC 19 83.5%
TS 21 96.5%
I hope it's good enough with my gimpy 2.62 gpa...
To all you DAT samurai's in training: Do not give up! Practice makes perfect, so practice like a mofo and you will do fine, I guarantee it. I'm going to update this post later with all the materials i used, what scores i got, what my impression was of the test, etc. to be or more help to you warriors. But for now, this warrior is throwing in the towel and having some sake. 🙂
update:
my test experience: I took my test at thomson prometric in Alameda, California. The test center was excellent. Very quiet and the screens are 17" and look good. They give you 4 pieces of scratch paper and as many pencils as you want. They even have candy to eat (Bad for your teeth! 🙂 )
However you have to trade the scratch papers to get more, not a big deal.
the test itself:
went through the tutorial. I found that you can use the keyboard to navigate through the test, which is great since it saves a little time and 'mis' clicks.
bio - lots of general questions. they are pretty picky on this one, and man i sure thought they picked all the boogers out my nose. I was actually feeling kind of sad about this section, too many came down to guessing. I guess for once I actually guessed some right in my life. crazy. anyway..
gchem - read kaplan. just read that thing and know the theory behind the equations and the periodic table and stuff. dont sweat solving crazy equations or problems. trust me.
ochem - sn1/sn2/e1/e2, stereochemistry, all basic stuff. no curve balls here.
PAT - gadz00ks! this section was crazy. Paper folding had some craziness, i don't even know how to explain. angles had some hard ones but overall not too bad, keyholes a little harder, paper folding a little harder, top/front/end piece o' cake. cubes, the same. I thought I did really well on this section...oh well.
Reading - i threw kaplan's advice in the trash can on this one. I read the questions, then read the passage til i found the answer. I found out I had a lot of extra time to read the whole passage 2-3 times too. A couple questions where you had to get the overall tone of the passage, but mainly detail. This one is a slam dunk if you can find details quick.
Quantitative - I seriously thought I only missed one problem on this one. I probably made a lot of careless mistakes, I finished early too. But anyway, just dont get hung up on any one problem, keep moving. Mostly algebra, lots of word problems, make sure you practice with kaplan, almost identical problems from kaplan's subject tests (different #'s though, of course). Know some basic trig, that's it. Just practice problems like crazy to nail this one.
The following are my kaplan test scores, this is to give you people still studying a gauge of where you may be:
Diagnostic / Midterm / Final
AA 17 16 18
PA 17 22 20
QR 19 16 20
RC 18 16 17
BIO 16 15 18
GC 11 13 17
OC 13 17 18
TS 14 15 18
included with kaplan are 3 full length tests.
test 1: 18/18/24 (AA/TS/PAT)
test 2: 19/19/23
test 3: 22/20/23
as you can see, near test day, I felt pretty prepared and confident. However, don't let these scores fool you! I was scoring pretty low on g-chem and on the actual test i rocked g-chem. And for math I was doing really good but on the actual math i score a litte lower. I also used topscore but I only finished 2 of the 3 tests. I didn't find it too useful. Most of the questions were too insane, and the PAT seemed easy, I was rockin' 24 / 25 / 25 on the PAT sections. Don't know what happened on the real thing, should of just used my hanzo sword from the beginning.. oh well. I also used an outline book for biology, i used cliff's AP, but I also checked out Schaum's bio outline. I read the entire book in like 2 days, so I don't know if I remember much, but I guess the information was lurking around in my brain on the real thing when I had to make those crazy guesses.
Sorry it's such a long post. Hopefully this will help some warriors who are still training.
goodluck everyone!
It has been a long and treacherous journey, and much training and precautions were taken prior to my battle today. By purchasing the Kaplan course and topscore materials, I felt prepared to face my opponent after about a month of studying.
My battle wounds:
AA 21 96.6%
PA 18 82.7% (I broke my sword while battling a foe during this one)
QR 20 91.2%
RC 22 91.7%
BIO 21 97.2%
GC 25 98.9% (I had to bust out the hanzo sword on this one)
OC 19 83.5%
TS 21 96.5%
I hope it's good enough with my gimpy 2.62 gpa...
To all you DAT samurai's in training: Do not give up! Practice makes perfect, so practice like a mofo and you will do fine, I guarantee it. I'm going to update this post later with all the materials i used, what scores i got, what my impression was of the test, etc. to be or more help to you warriors. But for now, this warrior is throwing in the towel and having some sake. 🙂
update:
my test experience: I took my test at thomson prometric in Alameda, California. The test center was excellent. Very quiet and the screens are 17" and look good. They give you 4 pieces of scratch paper and as many pencils as you want. They even have candy to eat (Bad for your teeth! 🙂 )
However you have to trade the scratch papers to get more, not a big deal.
the test itself:
went through the tutorial. I found that you can use the keyboard to navigate through the test, which is great since it saves a little time and 'mis' clicks.
bio - lots of general questions. they are pretty picky on this one, and man i sure thought they picked all the boogers out my nose. I was actually feeling kind of sad about this section, too many came down to guessing. I guess for once I actually guessed some right in my life. crazy. anyway..
gchem - read kaplan. just read that thing and know the theory behind the equations and the periodic table and stuff. dont sweat solving crazy equations or problems. trust me.
ochem - sn1/sn2/e1/e2, stereochemistry, all basic stuff. no curve balls here.
PAT - gadz00ks! this section was crazy. Paper folding had some craziness, i don't even know how to explain. angles had some hard ones but overall not too bad, keyholes a little harder, paper folding a little harder, top/front/end piece o' cake. cubes, the same. I thought I did really well on this section...oh well.
Reading - i threw kaplan's advice in the trash can on this one. I read the questions, then read the passage til i found the answer. I found out I had a lot of extra time to read the whole passage 2-3 times too. A couple questions where you had to get the overall tone of the passage, but mainly detail. This one is a slam dunk if you can find details quick.
Quantitative - I seriously thought I only missed one problem on this one. I probably made a lot of careless mistakes, I finished early too. But anyway, just dont get hung up on any one problem, keep moving. Mostly algebra, lots of word problems, make sure you practice with kaplan, almost identical problems from kaplan's subject tests (different #'s though, of course). Know some basic trig, that's it. Just practice problems like crazy to nail this one.
The following are my kaplan test scores, this is to give you people still studying a gauge of where you may be:
Diagnostic / Midterm / Final
AA 17 16 18
PA 17 22 20
QR 19 16 20
RC 18 16 17
BIO 16 15 18
GC 11 13 17
OC 13 17 18
TS 14 15 18
included with kaplan are 3 full length tests.
test 1: 18/18/24 (AA/TS/PAT)
test 2: 19/19/23
test 3: 22/20/23
as you can see, near test day, I felt pretty prepared and confident. However, don't let these scores fool you! I was scoring pretty low on g-chem and on the actual test i rocked g-chem. And for math I was doing really good but on the actual math i score a litte lower. I also used topscore but I only finished 2 of the 3 tests. I didn't find it too useful. Most of the questions were too insane, and the PAT seemed easy, I was rockin' 24 / 25 / 25 on the PAT sections. Don't know what happened on the real thing, should of just used my hanzo sword from the beginning.. oh well. I also used an outline book for biology, i used cliff's AP, but I also checked out Schaum's bio outline. I read the entire book in like 2 days, so I don't know if I remember much, but I guess the information was lurking around in my brain on the real thing when I had to make those crazy guesses.
Sorry it's such a long post. Hopefully this will help some warriors who are still training.
goodluck everyone!
