1. When I did the entire practice exam I would make sure I did the natural science one and not the individuals so that would help me with my timing, even though natural science 1 is really just bio 1, gc 1, and orgo 1. However when I went back over them multiple times afterwards, I would normally just do the separate ones.
2. I basically did all I wanted to do before taking my exam. Make sure you've taken all the bootcamp exams
and understand them all and then also I'd recommend taking that 2009 test a couple days out to (hopefully) give you a confidence boost. Knowing destroyer is key. If another way is easier for you then go for it, but the flash cards were a huge help for me.
3. Umm it depends. Probably first month was about 3-4 hours a day with a couple off days each week. Second month was around 6 hours a day with 1 off day a week. And then the last month was about 8-10+ hours a day with not many off days. A month is a lot of time! There is so much improvement you can make in this time period!
Oh yeah I wasn't a bio major so this probably isn't necessary for you. If you think it's a waste of time then don't worry about it. I definitely needed the refresher on the basics.
Umm not sure if you need this... but this is something I sent to someone about how I tackled the TFE section of PAT. Already wrote it up so might as well post it. Hope it helps you/someone!
Alright so this is the problem from Bootcamp that I chose:
You'll notice right away that the line counting method won't get you the final answer. Sure, sometimes it can help you eliminate an answer or two, but I found in the long run, it was just a waste of time because you weren't guaranteed anything. A lot of people say to try and visualize the 3-d object, but I found that was a little difficult sometimes. If you can do it, it helps a ton. If not, It's best to try and eliminate answer choices based on seeing what types of lines should be where.
So the first thing I do is try to find something that is very distinct and easy to find. So I look at the the front view and see the right angle on the right side. From the end view, this right angle will form a solid line because we can directly see where shape changes. So then we go to look at the answer and try to find that solid line. Every answer choice has that solid line right there, so we are unable to eliminate any answers.
Now I just move my eyes down a bit from that right angle on the front view and see that little indention. Because we can see the indention from looking on from the end view, we know that the closest line up from the bottom will be solid. This shows us that we can eliminate Answer Choice A.
Now I move up to that circle we can see on the front view image. If we find where that circle is supposed to be on the top view, we'll notice that it forms a cylinder shaped whole through the entire object (this is important because in some problems you'll see something like this that will only go halfway through or something. From the end view, we can't actually see that cylinder shaped hole through the object, so it will have to be a dashed line. But how many? The circle doesn't form any angles like a triangle would, so we should see a dashed line representing the bottom edge of the circle as well as the top edge of the circle. If we look at our remaining answer choices B, C, and D, we'll see that D is the only that has these two dashed lines, and therefore, D is the Correct Answer.
Notice we didn't even have to deal with any of that top part of the image from the end view. Speed is key in this section of the test, so instead of trying to find an image that will fit everything you see, I think it's best to just find ways you can eliminate other answers and decide on an answer choice from there.
