How long to study for OAT?

opto1995

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Is 8-9 weeks (studying ~5-6 hours for 5 days a week) enough time to study for the OAT? Should I study 6 days a week? I feel like I will have a decent handle on the sections aside from QR, physics and O-Chem which I plan to spend a decent amount of time on.

Also, any suggestions/advice for staying with the study schedule? I always find that when I allot time during study periods (such as finals etc) that I never actually spend as little time study for each subject as i intend to, I always end up spending waaay more time than I plan putting myself behind because I really like to go through all the content extremely thoroughly which I feel might screw me over with such a restricted study time span and so many subjects to cover.

At what point during the 8 weeks should I start doing practice tests and feel confident enough to do overall review of everything? 1-2 weeks out? Or throw one in half way?

Also as far as study materials, is it enough time to use Kaplan, OAT destroyer, and Chad's videos? Should I stick to one over the others?

Sorry for so many questions haha! I'm so nervous, but I really want to do well the first time and would really rather not write/rewrite during the school year.

Thanks so much in advance for any advice/direction/suggestion, I appreciate it more than ya know!

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I think it really depends per person based on how well you know the subjects beforehand and your own personal studying habits. But if you think you only need to spend a lot of time on those 3 subjects then 8-9 weeks sounds good.

Studying "schedules" never worked for me because I am also a slow studier. Also, some topics you schedule might end up being harder than anticipated and you'll find yourself needing to allot more time to it consequently throwing off the rest of your schedule. Mentally for me when this happened I just felt like I was falling behind and it threw me off so I'd advise against scheduling time frames to complete a certain topic or lesson.

My advice would be to take it slow and use up as much time as you need. Push back the OAT if needed because you'd much rather do it once and do it right. The only 'schedule' I would stick to is the 5-6 hours a day, 5 days a week.

I would start practice exams as soon as you've finished all your content.

I used Chad's for physics/chem/ochem and it was amazing. Kaplan is good for Bio but was a little detailed for me so I used Feralis Bio Notes (can find on the DAT threads/google) which are basically a condensed form of the AP Cliff Note's biology book. I also bought OAT destroyer but was not able to get through them because destroyer questions are notorious for being harder and I was low on time. But personally, I would've given myself maybe 2-3 weeks to go through the destroyer questions twice. (This is what I'm comfortable with but I'm sure someone else could go through them faster). If you're able to get through them you're more than solid on the OAT but I wouldn't really recommend it because it was a lot more dense than needed. There are many other threads on the forum detailing specific information about materials.
 
Here is what I did to study for the OAT. I spent 2.5 months studying and prepping for it.

First I watched and took notes on all of Chad's videos. They are extremely helpful if you are a visual learner and Chad shows a lot of ways to solve problems a lot faster during the actual exam. I had a notebook for each section so my notes wouldn't get unorganized. After you finish a video do the following quizzes that Chad offers. Also, Chad has a bunch of worksheets that you can print off to help you follow along while you are watching. The organic chemistry section also has a pamphlet of all the organic reactions. I did a little overkill and made notecards of each because I haven't taken Ochem in a very long time and being able to memorize the reactions helps a lot. I would say I spent a month on Chad's videos. I'm a nontraditional student so a lot of the material I had to go back and relearn because its been awhile since I've taken these courses. Also the biology section still might be free.

The next month I spent going through the OAT destroyer. This material is extremely helpful because its nothing but problems that are very identical to the actual OAT. I would try and divide up the problems like it was the actual OAT. I would do 40 ochem, 40ghem, 60 biology in a day and see how I scored. The book is divided into sections for Ochem, Bio, Gchem, QR, and Physics but the questions in each section are random and not by topic or subject. So it's kind of like the OAT. Chad videos for physics are very problem solving and not much theory. The OAT has a lot of theory based questions and OAT destroyer helped me prep for that tremendously. The QR section was my strongest section so I didn't study as often for that section compared to the others. The OAT also has solutions for each problem so if you are stuck on one they explain it very well. The biology section is amazing because they even explain what the wrong answer choices are to help you understand each answer choice (chances are you'll see them again on the actual OAT).

While I prepped for the OAT with OAT destroyer, every weekend for the last 3 weeks I took a practice test to see how I was doing. So I spent a total of 2 months preparing, 5-6 hours studying 4-5 days out of the week and that seemed to help a lot. I did fairly well on the OAT and had no problem getting accepted into the schools I applied to.

Avoid Kaplan! It is way overpriced and not worth it (in my opinion). I would only buy the large Kaplan book with all the Kaplan notes. You can get that book for $1,000 less than the actual program.
 
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