In my opinion, though, I feel like some schools on the other end of gpa/dat don't necessarily mean it should be your safety school. For example, asdoh has a low gpa/dat score, but that's because I think they strongly strongly emphasize on community service over anything else. So they accept people with low gpa/dat score with great community service, so it brings the averages down.
I think if you look at the excel sheet, there aren't really many schools that distinguish between the DAT and GPA a whole lot. There are only a few schools that have really drastic DAT and GPA ranking. Most schools just have "high standards". So even though their schools might have a lot higher DAT averages than GPA averages (like say a 21 and 3.4), it doesn't really mean that they give more importance to DAT. From what I gather while talking to a few representative from different schools, it seems more like if you meet their competitive quota then that's great. Like if the school average is 20/3.5, then a 22/3.4 is very similar to a 20/3.6; they would just see you as "competitive applicant" rather than "competitive applicant with STELLAR DAT (unless it is like a 24)". Apparently, to them, it hardly makes a difference. At least that was the kind of feedback I was getting when I was talking to them. That's what they tell me, but it is suspicious that schools have pretty consistent DAT/GPA score ratio year after year after year -.-... so yeah my 2 cents 😀
