Thanks for your reply, nicmc
1. I still need to take Human Anatomy & Physiology, Stat, and Microbiology. (1 semester)
2. It seems our science curriculum are at 80 - 90% compare to national level. Anyway, I learned all OAT courses related and haven't review them for 1 - 2 semesters now. I just hope that you can give me an idea so I can pace myself to study.
Thanks
I don't think it's a big deal at all to not have stats or micro. I took my test without having taken micro and got a 400 on the bio section, so no worries =P I had taken anatomy though, which really helped when it came to things like respiration and kidney function. So long as you can commit to really studying those processes on your own, it's not a big deal.
Will you have next summer off? If so, then that's the time to study for the OAT. I took the Kaplan course this last February, but then didn't really start to study hard until July. For all of July and half of August, I was study between 2 and 7 hours every single day of the week, and taking a full length practice test every weekend. That helped me work on pacing and see a wide variety of questions. I highly recommend using a variety of prep resources though - not just relying on one like OAT Destroyer or Kaplan. I found that each of them was strong in certain sections, and they each had different kinds of questions (like the biology questions with one set of prep materials seemed easy, but ridiculously difficult with another...but no pattern among them for one always being hard or easy). Here's the link for the full length sample OAT put out by the test company:
https://www.ada.org/oat/oat_sample_test.pdf
But still...don't just use that because again there are lots of other question types that aren't on there. Kaplan puts out a book you can buy in bookstores that is just a book of sample tests. I used that some and would highlight questions as I learned the material and definitely knew the answer, then go back again and again to the ones that I didn't know until I was sure that I had learned the material dealing with those questions (not just memorizing the answer to that one question, since it's highly unlikely that I would see it exactly like that on the exam).
I took my test at the end of August. But I had had all of my pre-req's up to that point within the last year, so it was pretty fresh in my brain. I had also been tutoring chemistry at the university during the summer to beef up my chem. So if you feel like some of the stuff isn't as fresh, then I would definitely spend a full 2-3 months studying a lot every day. You don't want to lose the material you are learning!
My one thing against OAT Destroyer is that it might be a little too in depth. The problem with that is that you end up memorizing more than you need to know. In theory, that's great because you will have a more complete understanding of biology or whatever other subject. But the problem is that there is so much to cram into your brain for this test that any extra can be distracting. That's just my two cents though
🙂