Funny thing - as I was taking the DAT I thought that the section was not as hard as some people made it out to be. Though when I received my scores I obviously stood corrected. Perhaps one aspect is that you are taking the real thing with a very real timer ticking away, and that can sometimes mess with your concentration. Some figures are just plain bizarre and none of the keyholes or models seem to quite fit while others seem to match every option in the list of answers. For example, I was on the 3rd to the last question in the PAT section in the pattern folding section and I noticed that two answer choices were identical. I had about seven minutes and decided to investigate. The figures were pie shaped and had the same number of shaded regions, etc. Very strange indeed. The angles are brutal as some only vary about 1 to 2 degrees from the others, and they are not all aligned the same. I remember reading a caveat in Barrons that stated that only 75 questions in the PAT are graded and the remaining 15 are experimental and not held against you. In other words, the test writers are testing new questions on you. I did some thinking about this and surmised that it could potentially harm you in the sense that if you correctly marked the experimental 15, and missed several of the normal 75, it could really lower your score. Conversely, that could also work to your advantage. However, I don't know if the above is true or not as Barron's is the only place I encountered it, though it does seem logical and probable. I don't think you are going to get a clear-cut answer, like "it's difficult because of 'x'", as there are several factors at work, or rather working against you, when it comes to the PAT.
