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Hey y’all! Just another one of those OAT breakdown posts lol! I studied my butt off for 3 months starting at the end of May til beginning of August and I only worked once a week as I wanted to focus entirely on studying for the OAT since I’m not the greatest at standardized testing! Hope this could help those who are currently studying for the OAT as these posts helped me too!
I studied mainly with OAT Booster, the only other source was a few Chad’s prep videos on YouTube. I used the 3 months schedule from OAT Booster and I followed it pretty religiously when watching the content videos. I only started to diverge from it a little when doing question banks because I wanted to focus more on my weaknesses. However, I’d still refer to the schedule to stay on track.
Actual AA: 380 / TS: 390
Practice AA: 350 - 360
Quantitative Reasoning: (ave practice: 350 / actual: 360) I memorized all the equations from the formula sheet and did a lot of practice questions. Though I’d say the practice tests provided more realistic questions and I watched the video solutions thoroughly. I had the most difficulty in applied math and probability so I mainly focused on those which I’d say appeared most often on test.
Reading comp: (ave practice: 360 / actual: 380) I kept doing the practice passages (I think I did all of them except 3). IMO the OAT booster passages were more difficult than the actual OAT. The strategy I did would be reading the first few passages and then going thru the questions to see what I could answer and then doing search and destroy for the rest. But on the actual test, the questions were chronological with the passages so I ended up just reading one passage and then answering a few questions in order.
Biology: (ave practice: 360 / actual: 370) I saw a lot of ppl mention that the biology section had a lot of breadth and I’d agree. I lowkey would get overwhelmed studying for the bio section cuz it was sm but doing the Anki decks, questions banks and studying the cheat sheets were most helpful just so I could learn as much content. I focused a lot on anatomy and hormones, but atleast from my memory I did not see much of any anatomy or hormones. It’s more cell bio stuff from what i remember.
General Chem: (ave practice: 350 / actual: 390) Once again the question banks were really good as well as the cheat sheets. There were a lot of Acids and Bases on the OAT. I focused a lot of time on acid bases, especially titrations and finding concentrations of stuff.
Organic chem: (ave practice: 340 / actual: 390)The cheat sheets were awesome for this section. I purely focused on studying from these and I memorized all the reactions by writing them over and over again. Mnemonics really helped in this case for me to remember all the reactions. I’d also try to understand the concept of the mechanism to better remember so I took a lot of notes on those while watching the vids. In terms of reagents, I just remembered the most important ones that defined the rxns. Focused a lot on fundamentals and substitutions & eliminations as those were my weakest and they showed up a lot on the OAT.
Physics (ave practice: 320 / actual: 370)This is def the section I struggled with most. I memorized all the equations by writing them out each day, but better understanding the concept behind the equations helped. I’ll admit there weren’t as many practice questions I hoped but I just kept doing the questions banks over and over again. The practice test questions I believed provided the more realistic challenge representative of OAT. As many others have said, optics, kinematics, and energy & momentum showed up a lot on the OAT.
Good luck to those who are still studying! You guys got this! As you saw with my practice scores, don’t let them bog you down as they aren’t always representative of your actual score! Of course don’t take the notion of scoring higher from your practice tests as a guarantee either tho since ik it can be different for each person (I tried not to count on that so I wouldn’t slack during my studying) ! Keep studying hard but also smart (like focusing on weaknesses) and try to do a little bit of each section each day if you can so ur memory is fresh of each section!
