honestly dental school requires you to budget your time and cram as if it were finals week in college. someone with a full load of science classes, researching, volunteering, and maintaining a high gpa obviously has great time management skills and discipline. doing well on the dat requires you to cram if you plan on taking it during the summer in college. if you're a nontrad with a bunch of time, there's no excuse for you to not do well on the DAT. doing well on the dat shows that you know how to cram which you will have to do in dental school and how well you know the basic sciences. the more you know the basic sciences, the easier it will be for you to pick up on the more difficult subjects in dental school. dental schools look bad when their students have to drop out due to being unable to understand the material and fail a class. but mostly, the dat is there to screen out people with high gpa due to their going to a school with severe grade inflation and not due to their hard work and learning because all schools vary in difficulty. high gpa could also show how well you cram. the person determines everything. you could have a low incoming stats and then all of a sudden be very motivated and disciplined to do well in dental school. the other way is also true. you could have done really well in college just to get into dental school and when you realize that you don't want to specialize and that gunnin' for that A isn't all that important, you could slack off. so in the end, the best way to pick an applicant is actually getting to know them. but they can't do that so they resort to interview, biased reports from other people who have gotten to know you, and measurements of performance.
