Okay, now that I've recovered.....here's how the day went (warning, this post goes on for a while)
Test center was packed, every station was occupied. Still, I was on edge despite trying to calm down listening to yo yo ma for 1/2 hour in the parking lot.
Bio: There were some real left fielders here. Classification tied into evolution type questions. I got both the sea urchin and the bicarbonate questions. I marked/ skipped like 10 questions on the first pass, the nerves were on edge still
Chem: I was expecting to go higher than 19, again, i think it's the nerves that psyched me out coz i left a whole lot of questions the first pass through (and they were pretty straight forward ones).
Orgo: Basically, my worst performance of the day (relatively) in my opinion. Again, a lot of questions were pretty straight forward, more psychological pressure than anything, I didn get a few theory which were hit or miss depending on how you knew the material. I think focusing on reactions should be central to orgo learning but pay attention to factoids/ mechanism details, that will help a lot.
Science: I went back and filled in the incompletes (which were plenty). I was tight on time and I think the damage had been done, some I know i guessed on (in bio/chem/orgo). Overall, tougher than what I had expected. I think everyone softening up the real DAT saying that topscore is wayy harder in orgo/GC is stretching it a little. It's good practice for the computer simulation and that's it. You need to be exposed to as many problems as possible, which may have saved my butt from a 17 but given a different set of questions..who knows?
PAT:
Wow, TFE was easy, cubes were easy, hole punching was easy except for 2 questions where a fold appeared out of nowhere (I.e. fold in half from left to right so you have a tall half sheet of paper <--normal till here. And then all of a sudden the tall block was divided into 2 without the paper taking up less area so those 2 totally stumped me). Aperture required close observation of minute details. Pattern folding had a few tough ones, nothing impossible though. Angle ranking was INSANE! one problem was literally
\_ \_ \_ \__ <--like 1 degree difference i think
Break: I wolfed down a power gel. This i think was one of the main causes of my unexpectedly high (for me) QR score. The caffiene in the gel got me riled up.
RC: passages on Ca2+, ageing process and antibiotics. Read/ made notes for 5-6 mins, spent the rest of the 20 (per passage) answering. Nothing really bad except for the passage which is displayed across the whole width of the screen (topscore has a little window which i was used to) so it took a few paragraphs to get it in motion; im pretty fast at making notes while reading so it wasn't a problem. The power gel really woke me up and had me alert...
QR: There was 2-3 i knew i had no clue whatsoever; on required the variance forumula (which I failed to learn) and a few others. I spent 20 seconds on a question. If I felt I was going to get the right answer, I completed it, if i though it would take a while/ i wasn't going to get the answer, I skipped it. This strategy worked really well as I wasn't bogged down at all during the whole QR section. Another thing was that I tend to recheck my answer, but in the QR there is NO time to do this, just try to be on spot with your calculations and you should be good (this method again has a rate of success proportional to your level of accuracy/proficiency with calculations). I ended up with enough time to get to all the marked/ incompletes
Overall, 18PAT, 20AA, im not complaining, I could have done better, but that's a relative statement...someone with a 24AA saying that vs someone with a 17AA would mean two different things.
Studywise, 1 1/2 months, ~3-4 hours a day. There were some days where I didn't/ couldn't motivate myself to study so I just took the day off and was fresher than before the next day..just make sure you don't have too many of these. I really cranked up the heat this last week with practice tests and a LOT of QR. I used the Kaplan white book (I took the course 2 yrs ago and also the test 17/17 eek!), barrons, topscore pro, all the kaplan practice tests and some old AP chem SAT algebra books.
I'd like to say thanks to all at SDN for the help, its people like you who kept me motivated. However, there is a lot of false/ innacurate information floating around. Don't read a few posts about how people felt about their tests and draw conclusions about your performance from that....a good/ decent DAT score has to be earned..give up all external distractions...heck i'm a distance runner and I haven't put on my running shoes for the last 1 1/2 months!
