just wondering, note taking by hands or words?

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kies89

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When you guys studied DAT bio

did you write down the notes? or just typed them?

i prefer writing down for notes, but bio just have too much information so after one chapter my hands hurt like crazy..

for ochem and genchem i guess i need to draw some of the things so i wrote notes down

but for bio...


did you guys typed the notes?
 
When you guys studied DAT bio

did you write down the notes? or just typed them?

i prefer writing down for notes, but bio just have too much information so after one chapter my hands hurt like crazy..

for ochem and genchem i guess i need to draw some of the things so i wrote notes down

but for bio...


did you guys typed the notes?

I have the same question.
 
My reply is only towards bio.

I hand wrote bio notes until I realized this was ineffective for me. I was studying from Cliffs and Barrons AP, and generally I take notes to filter the fluff from the 'stuff' that actually is critical.

The thing is, in a book like Cliffs this has already been done for you. It is as if someone took notes on a textbook. If you shorten what is in Cliffs very much, you are losing important information. I ended up essentially copying down entire pages and this took a very long time.

Instead, I decided to invest my time reading Cliffs and Barrons and doing all questions multiple times and highlighting the book for areas I needed further review in rather than noting them. Reading Cliffs is essentially like going over your notes. You can read Cliffs and do all questions in one long day if you don't take notes, same for Barrons. If you dedicate 10 days to strictly bio, you could read each of these books 5 times and know basically everything in them.

I hope this helps, worked well for me as I ended up in the 99th percentile for bio.
 
I used anki to make flash cards on what I thought would be essential topics. To test myself afterwards, I used the end-of-chapter quizzes, DATqvault and DAT destroyer.
 
My reply is only towards bio.

I hand wrote bio notes until I realized this was ineffective for me. I was studying from Cliffs and Barrons AP, and generally I take notes to filter the fluff from the 'stuff' that actually is critical.

The thing is, in a book like Cliffs this has already been done for you. It is as if someone took notes on a textbook. If you shorten what is in Cliffs very much, you are losing important information. I ended up essentially copying down entire pages and this took a very long time.

Instead, I decided to invest my time reading Cliffs and Barrons and doing all questions multiple times and highlighting the book for areas I needed further review in rather than noting them. Reading Cliffs is essentially like going over your notes. You can read Cliffs and do all questions in one long day if you don't take notes, same for Barrons. If you dedicate 10 days to strictly bio, you could read each of these books 5 times and know basically everything in them.

I hope this helps, worked well for me as I ended up in the 99th percentile for bio.


This is exactly how i feel taking notes. It seems ineffective.

Ques: Was Cliff's and Barron's sufficient for the questions on the DAT? Did you use any other resources? What else did you use for practice questions?

TIA
 
This is exactly how i feel taking notes. It seems ineffective.

Ques: Was Cliff's and Barron's sufficient for the questions on the DAT? Did you use any other resources? What else did you use for practice questions?

TIA


The material in Cliff's and Barron's is sufficient for content except that they lack in a few simple anatomy things that could possibly show up on your test I have heard (but didn't on mine) such as basic bone anatomy (ie osteons, haversian canals etc), basic ear anatomy, eye anatomy, and very basic brain anatomy. I am not positive those subjects are fair game, but were told they were by a friend so I read them out of an anatomy text book.

As far as questions go, I feel that barrons and cliffs do not have enough difficult questions. I would add in DAT Destroyer bio questions, the Topscore Tests, and DATQvault questions to cover your bases. I did all of these questions + all the ones out of the the AP books. The real test seemed very simple after knowing all this material.

It sounds overwhelming, but it isn't that bad. I really only studied over Christmas break (though I had read my first time through Cliffs before then) and took the test at the end of break and felt this was an appropriate amount of time to study.
 
Typed up all my notes except for test corrections. Those I hand-wrote (on my computer screen because tablet pcs are awesome!). The main reason is that when I need to work fast my hand-writing is not very neat, but I can type relatively error free. Also One-Note + Windows' snip tool let me just cut and paste important diagrams and tables right out of the Cliff's and Campbell's PDFs which I had.

In general, typing is always faster if you can touch-type so just stick to that. If you find you type slower than you write then hand-written notes will work.
 
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