hey, I just finished the DAT on Monday and was thinking about the same things leading up to my test. After reading so many posts on this site about using schaums, GRE bio, etc. to supplement Kaplan I became paranoid and spent around 90% of my time studying outside kaplan. It ended up being a huge waste of my time...the bio section is a joke, and the chem sections were way easier than kaplan. Because i spent so much time on bio, i did a little worse in both chems, but still got a 21 TS. Of the 40 questions in bio, i would say around 37 were extremely similar to Kaplan questons. of the other 3, two were covered in the book and weren't too difficult. I had one question I had no idea on, but it wasn't the type of question you could study for anyways.
After reading so many posts on this site over the last few months and taking the actual test I wonder if people are posting to scare people or if they just don't have good science backgrounds. If you are a science major, especially bio or chem, at a good university and do well in your classes then i would just stick w/ Kaplan.
I thought the reading section was much easier than the practice tests, even though I scored about the same.
For the PAT I literally spent 1-2 hrs studying, all the night before. I went over barrons and took one kaplan practice and got a 17..i figured the hell with that section because i was freaking out about bio classification/ecology etc. i ended up w/ a 19 on the real thing and found it a little easier then kaplan w/ the exception of the angles, however it was easier to eliminate answer choices in this section.
The one section I would reccomend putting a lot of time into is math. I scored well on SAT math and figured i would breeze through this section. I never took a full length practice test, so by the time this section came around I was out of gas on top of not being prepared and only got a 17.
the reason im saying math is so important is that its a great way to boost your AA.. my roommate and I both had the same TS score, 21...I scored 1 pt higher in bio and orgo, same score in reading and he scored one higher in chem...but in the end my AA was a 20, his was a 22. the reason- i got a 17 in math, he got a 26. and the math section is easy if u put in the time.
The best advice I could give u is spend most of your time studying both chems and math...they are the best sections to boost your AA. For example, I scored a 22 in bio...97 percentile. I put all my time into it and i did well, but it doesnt pay off as much because of the way the test is standardized. I prob. missed around 3-4 questions of the 40, but even if I had an open book I don't feel I would've scored higher. you have to figure there's a chance you're going to make some stupid mistakes even if u know the material, so while missing 3 out of 40 in bio is a 22, only missing 3 out of 30 on chem is prob. going to be higher.
I really dont understand the way they standardize the scores, but missing around 3 out of the 40 math quesitons is a 25, where in bio missing 3 out of 40 is a 22. Considering there are only 30 questions in each chem section u have to assume missing 2 of the 30 compares to the 4 in bio, in both these cases being around a 25.
On top of this the chem and math sections are much easier to study for, you wont see anything that isn't in kaplan. if u can do all the practice tests and understand the questions u will do very well on the test. studying for bio also makes u feel insecure because they can really throw anything at you, and it doesn't pay off because its not scaled the same even though there are a more questions and the material is much broader.
sorry this is so long, but the best advice i can give u is put more of your time into the chems and math....
