Retaking the dat...march2007

[Brie07]

I first took the DAT in Aug 2006. I used kaplan blue book, topscore, and the achiever. I found that the basics needed for bio/gchem/orgo to be covered in kaplan, but they do not give you enough detail to score 20+. You might hit around 17-18ish(which i did) in these sections. The hardest part for me was the math, due to a lack of time not necessarily the questions themselves. So...the only school that I’m really interested in, is giving me another chance, by allowing me to take the dats again in march to get my scores (mainly math) a few points higher.

This time around..
I've been studying for roughly 1 month now, and have about 3.5 weeks till D-Day(as i call it). I started off reviewing the kaplan books again, just to refresh my memory. I've been a daily "reader" on SDN and have heard all the great remarks about the DAT Destroyer. I've purchased it, and now for the past 2 weeks been reviewing it slowly. It seems thus far, to have helped me go the extra mile in cementing in the foundations and also expanding upon areas untouched by the other study tools. Hopefully this all works out, this time around, and I won't have to bother studying all summer again. If anyone has any thoughts as to what areas I should really focus on in the math/ochem sections, feel free to let me know.

 

[fancymylotus]

I first took the DAT in Aug 2006. I used kaplan blue book, topscore, and the achiever. I found that the basics needed for bio/gchem/orgo to be covered in kaplan, but they do not give you enough detail to score 20+. You might hit around 17-18ish(which i did) in these sections. The hardest part for me was the math, due to a lack of time not necessarily the questions themselves. So...the only school that I’m really interested in, is giving me another chance, by allowing me to take the dats again in march to get my scores (mainly math) a few points higher.

This time around..
I've been studying for roughly 1 month now, and have about 3.5 weeks till D-Day(as i call it). I started off reviewing the kaplan books again, just to refresh my memory. I've been a daily "reader" on SDN and have heard all the great remarks about the DAT Destroyer. I've purchased it, and now for the past 2 weeks been reviewing it slowly. It seems thus far, to have helped me go the extra mile in cementing in the foundations and also expanding upon areas untouched by the other study tools. Hopefully this all works out, this time around, and I won't have to bother studying all summer again. If anyone has any thoughts as to what areas I should really focus on in the math/ochem sections, feel free to let me know.

ochem=DAT destroyer roadmaps

 

[leedizzal]

Hey bud I feel ya on the math it pretty much was my worst nightmare....


Um if you dont mind me asking what did ya pull in your QR section....

I got a 15 and none of the schools said it would be a problem for me...

Here is what I did for the math, little history on me I dont even know my times tables you ask me what 6 times 8 is I have no idea I have to count it up on my fingers.. Same with adding and subtracting...


Now what I found to be the hardest part about the math is the time... The problems arent that hard it just takes ppl like me a crap load of time to do them because many of them require at least 5 operations to solve.. Seeing as it takes me 30 seconds almost to do a farily simple long division problem I could easily end up spending close to 2 min on a problem...


So I knew that this was going to kill me and I had to develop a stratgy for this section...

What I did was immediatly stop using your calculator just put it away when your studying and just start working tons and tons of problems... This gets your mind used to thinking without a calculator and you get amazingly a lot faster, I memoreized my times tables this helps tremendously, I also bought a book called math magic which taught me how to add and subract numbers very quickly in my head...

Now aside from all that stuff what helped me the most was learning what kinds of problems I could do quickly... Key word here is what I could do quickly ...


For instance the questions that asked me to arrange the fractions in order from least to greatest or some variation of that... I dont even both to look at those cause it takes me way to long to order the fractions so just skip it.... Go onto the nxt problem it might be one you can knock out way easier...

If you do not get to the end of this section before the time runs out you will not get a good score in it at all guranteed. So from all the practice tests that I took and the tons of problems I went over I strated learning which kinds of problems I could knock out with just knowing a formula and plugging stuff in.. For instance probability problems you just use the formula kaplan gives you do some easy math and presto your done.

A lot of the word problems work this way job problems are usually a simple ratio set it up and solve your done...

Money problems just set up the alebraic expression solve it your done...

The key is recognize in the first 10 seconds if you can do this problem quickly or not, then either do it or skip it and move on, there are a lot of easy questions at the end of the section that you will never see if you dont skip some hard ones...

I tore through it this way then had about 10 min left went back to the harder ones worked on them till the last 2 min and then went through and just guessed on the remaining blank questions and thats how I did the section... Got me a 15 not great but not to bad either.. better than a 12 or so...

And I could have done better with more practice probably...

HOpe that helps a bit good luck...

 

[Brie07]

Thanks for the advice, that is what i was thinking as my plan this time around as well. That way i can get all the way through and not miss out on any easy ones at the end. Thanks for the advice, the first time around i scored a 15 on the math section i just need to get it 17+. I've been doing tons of problems on my days off, hope this helps.

Thanks again