PAT Timing Help

[dentistrypapi]

Hello everyone. I am taking the Canadian DAT soon and I did my first PAT practice test offered by DAT Bootcamp. It was an extreme time crunch and I ended up not being able to answer 10 TFE questions and 3 cube counting questions on time.

My strategy was to start from cube counting as that is one of my strongest sections then I moved through to pattern folding. Then back to angles and hole punching before finally returning to keyholes.

The estimated score I received was a 20. I would really appreciate any comments/feedback on how to improve my timing on this section. I have been practicing individual questions for a while trying to build a personalized approach but I am still unable to answer at a rate that would allow me to go through this section completely.

Thank you!

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[Kenshen]

I went straight through this section. I found skipping to different sections for me wasted crucial time. I stuck with a try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less, if I hit 15 seconds, I marked the question, took a guess, then moved on.

The only differences for me was the Hole Punch where I made a grid for each question and the Cube Counting where I made a table and tallied the # of sides from 0 to 5 then quickly answered the questions using that table I made for each figure.

I ended up receiving a PAT of 26. But of course, that is what worked for me. Definitely keep practicing to gain better judgement to be able to guess fairly well within 15 seconds. If you don't know, just trust your judgement and move on.

 

[dentistrypapi]

I went straight through this section. I found skipping to different sections for me wasted crucial time. I stuck with a try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less, if I hit 15 seconds, I marked the question, took a guess, then moved on.

The only differences for me was the Hole Punch where I made a grid for each question and the Cube Counting where I made a table and tallied the # of sides from 0 to 5 then quickly answered the questions using that table I made for each figure.

I ended up receiving a PAT of 26. But of course, that is what worked for me. Definitely keep practicing to gain better judgement to be able to guess fairly well within 15 seconds. If you don't know, just trust your judgement and move on.

Thanks so much for the insight! I definitely get caught up with questions (even with RCT this is an issue). I keep hearing that practicing PAT questions will help you decrease the time spent per question. Right now it takes me about 45 seconds - 1 minute per question which I would definitely want to see go down. Were there any tips/tricks that you used to get your time down to 15 seconds or was that just attributed to practice?

 

[Kenshen]

Thanks so much for the insight! I definitely get caught up with questions (even with RCT this is an issue). I keep hearing that practicing PAT questions will help you decrease the time spent per question. Right now it takes me about 45 seconds - 1 minute per question which I would definitely want to see go down. Were there any tips/tricks that you used to get your time down to 15 seconds or was that just attributed to practice?

PRACTICE MAINLY!!! I found patterns within each section to look for that worked for me. There will be hard ones that you can spend minutes on and still get wrong, so it is better to get all the easy ones that you can pick the correct answer easily then waste your time on the hard ones when each is worth the same # of points. Practice gave me confidence and trained my eyes to be used to quickly evaluating questions. But also remember a low PAT score can be made up in school, a low TS or AA can't be made up as easily.

 

[tugboat90001]

I found doing angles, hole punching, cube counting, pattern folding first to be the best since they're the sections that take the least amount of time. I usually blast through this section and usually aim to have 25-35 minutes left for TFE and keyhole.