First of all **** facebook. I see all these ugly losers with 500+ "friends" posting ****** comments like "Oh join this group, party, get drunk, and get laid thurhurhur". The real sad thing is these guys seep into dental school groups like mice through a hole in the wall. Posers finally found an outlet. You don't wanna be them. The coolest, hottest people I've met use that hunk of virtual trash minimally.
O.K. /rant off
On to the DAT's.
I had a 19/19/17 pat first attempt. No excuses, that was my score. I love how people try to back any poor set of scores by inserting lame excuses after it. =)
I think the key is to
review the material daily. MOST people, HATE to do this. They would rather spend 5 hrs learning a topic, then just move on to the next the next day and let it wane. THAT is what I did differently. Just don't be an idiot while memorizing the stuff and I don't think most applying will have problems understanding sciences on the first or second pass.
1. 3 months before the test I stated this was war: me versus the damn test and strategized. This is also key. You must start with a goal and a plan. This helps your brain recognize the seriousness of the thing. Here I devised a plan of attack against all my weak spots in the test. I actually wrote it out what I need to achieve and how, just to help my brain get it.
2. I started doing 1 science subject and also practiced PAT.For the sciences I used some old examkrackers books, but any review book will do, since, I used books from the library and ONLINE resources to nail every single subject listed on the ADEA guide no matter how much I hated some of them. As I read through I visualized the concepts and memorized as much detail presented in the review books. It takes more effort and is more rewarding to not lift a pen but to visualize and understand, rather than autopilot mode underlining entire books! Save the ink, not your braincells. Force yourself. This is gonna be hard and going to hurt your brain at first. I honestly think why some are B and some are A students comes down to studying smarter like this.
For PAT I knew there was a "key" to doing each PAT problem well, and the faster I got to know what that was, I could use it more while studying, essentially automatically studying (via practice tests). Important: So you never waste any precious PAT practice problem, take ONE or TWO practice PAT tests and GO OVER IT. DONOT take any more NEW practice tests until you can REDO the first or second test you took having figured out the strategies for each type of PAT problem in these tests only. Spend as much time with as few tests as possible to find your master strategies. Then, you'll have plenty of new practice tests remaining to REINFORCE you for test day. Yes, there is a key to doing each type of PAT problem - discover it.
3. Every study session and every practice test on every topic including PAT I made it a policy to REWRITE anything that I got wrong or was not clear in my OWN words. Then, I kept pages of these in a separate notebook. I finally reviewed the whole notebook when I woke up and before bed. At first this took me a while, but as long-term memory kicked in (first time in my life I realized the power of this) by the day of the test I could do it 20x as fast.
4. Reading - search and destroy enough said.
5. QR- HIGH SCHOOL MATH books from the library. You'd be shocked how stupid you'll feel (for the non-math majors, I hope!). Try to do these as much as you can.
By doin the above on my second and last attempt, which was the fairer representation of my skills, my scores were 22-23 on all sciences, 23 on reading, 19qr, and 24 on pat for a 22/22/24.
I studied maybe 4 hrs a day tops, and reviewed/revised for about an hour a day on average. Make sure your spirits are high and chillax each day. On the day before the test if you have done everything well for a 95%+ score you should feel true confidence because by then you know you have no weak-spots. Just review your written out notes and go to bed early, have a nice breakfast, yadda yadda.
Materials I used:
Examkrackers 5th edition subject books,
Kaplan DAT blue book - nice quick review, funneled topics, easy to read diagrams
Wikipedia, On-line resources, funny how the more "kid" oriented websites and flash tools helped me much more. Simplicity rocks.
DAT destroyer 2009 edition - made me curse the author for the extremely tricky problems, but I think it paid off learning from mistakes and going that extra step conceptually. This really solidified my science concepts.
Topscore
CRACKDATPAT
