Hi everyone, I took the DAT a couple days ago and ended up doing better than I expected. I know it's not like a 25+ AA breakdown or something but hopefully some of you guys still find this helpful or reassuring!
Background & study timeline:
Rising junior; 3.7 GPA; majoring in Neuroscience. Started "studying" mid-May with an entire Notion calendar all set up with Booster's 10 week study schedule, but of course fell behind way too many times to count (who actually follows through with these things?). I was shadowing in the mornings and some weeks I had research obligations but these hours were pretty chill and flexible. I started taking practice tests (individual, not full-length) one month before my exam. Never had a set amount of study time per day... it varied from 0 hours to 4-5 hours. Should you treat it like a 9-5 job? Maybe. Is that somewhat unrealistic? I think so... but if you can do it and it works for you, then go for it.
Materials used:
Background & study timeline:
Rising junior; 3.7 GPA; majoring in Neuroscience. Started "studying" mid-May with an entire Notion calendar all set up with Booster's 10 week study schedule, but of course fell behind way too many times to count (who actually follows through with these things?). I was shadowing in the mornings and some weeks I had research obligations but these hours were pretty chill and flexible. I started taking practice tests (individual, not full-length) one month before my exam. Never had a set amount of study time per day... it varied from 0 hours to 4-5 hours. Should you treat it like a 9-5 job? Maybe. Is that somewhat unrealistic? I think so... but if you can do it and it works for you, then go for it.
Materials used:
- DAT Booster - This was my main source of prep material. I had a hard time choosing between BC and Booster because there were many pros and cons to each of them, but overall the cheaper price of Booster was more appealing to me.
- DAT Bootcamp - Took the free full-length test on there, used their condensed bio notes, and sometimes did their daily warmup practices.
- Anki - Gave up on this like two weeks into studying and briefly picked it back up two weeks before my exam... it's definitely a good resource though. I first used Booster's pre-made deck for bio, then mainly went through their OC deck.
- Reddit - I don't know if any of you guys do this but I would literally google stuff like "how to remember ___ reddit" and most of the time I'd find really helpful mnemonics and explanations lowkey better than other sites.
- Bio (26): Got super lucky with this section to be honest. I was worried the most about bio because it just felt like too much information to physically remember, but it really is true that everything is so much broader on the real thing. A lot of times I could immediately cross out answer choices that were obviously incorrect. Maybe this was also due to the fact that I crammed some last minute question banks the day before. Spent 20 minutes on this section. I'd recommend using BC's condensed notes first, then Booster's if you want extra information on certain chapters. I also loved Booster's bio videos. They definitely need to make more with the same guy teaching.
- GC (22): I'd say Booster PTs #8-10 are the most similar in difficulty to the real thing. I got thrown off by a couple of low-yield questions but overall it wasn't too bad. Booster kind of makes you unnecessarily nervous about calculations. You'll probably only get one question on the DAT that doesn't set up the equation for you. I also didn't know that they provide you with values like the gas constant since Booster practice tests never did, so that was a quite a pleasant surprise.
- OC (22): I did absolutely atrocious in orgo II so I was most scared about this section before I started studying. Surprisingly though, this was my best section overall in all the PTs I took. I hated orgo I and II but loved the labs, so maybe part of that contributed to this performance. The stuff they test about OC is much simpler than anything I remember about this course. I'm sad that they didn't ask more questions about stability/IR/NMR/acidity. I was surprised by the amount of reaction questions... maybe it just felt like a lot to me because I was caught off guard. Use Anki if you can and make sure you know your substitution/elimination mechanisms.
- PAT (21): Angle ranking was similar, hole punching was a LITTLE harder, cube counting was slightly easier (looked more like BC's cube counting from that one free FL test), pattern folding was the same, keyholes were kind of easier, and TFE was easier to me. The computer screen size at my testing center was much bigger and brighter than the one I usually did PAT on, so it was a lot easier on the eyes. I ALWAYS ran out of time on Booster PTs but somehow on the real thing I had time left over to check marked questions?? I slacked off with PAT practice. Booster's keyhole generator glitches sometimes and gives you answer choices that are literally the exact same shape.
- RC (21): Disappointed the most with this section. I guess I got overconfident because I love reading and was scoring really well on the smaller 20 min Booster reading practices, so I didn't bother taking most of the longer RC PTs. Thought I would score so much higher. I only felt unsure with a couple of questions from the second passage. My strategy was to quickly skim through all of the passage questions, then read the full text with the questions in mind and highlight related information.
- QR (18): I'm not too surprised by this score. I can't math + I'm so slow at working through questions. Wished they gave more statistics questions
Just work on your timing for this section. I found that my PT scores increased once I started immediately marking and skipping questions that I knew would take longer to solve and going back to them after finishing the easier questions.
