burton117 said:
Great number of responses so far!!
DAT Achiever seems to be leading the poll so far.. anybody care to describe why?
Is it all the PAT practice tests that make it so helpful?
keep the tips coming - this is great!
22AA 23TS 24 Bio 23GC 22OC 24RC 19PAT 19QR
Everyone says the PAT is way harder than the KAPLAN PAT but i didnt think it was any harder. My score did come out lower (19) vs 20-22 on Kaplan but i feel that was due more to the grading than the actual difficulty.
Honestly, I found the material on the PAT to be easy and this was quite refreshing considering the anxiety I had for this section. DAT achiever was much much much more difficult but it was definately a good thing to have studied off.
For every other section, Kaplan was very helpful (including the QR). The QR on the real DAT is NOT much easier than the QR from Kaplan so expect the same relative difficulty of problems. You will have a little less number crunching but overall it felt the same. I was hoping to do better here but I got nervous and started skipping ALL word problems and answering the easy algerbra/arithmetic problems. I did have time to come back and finish all problems but I must have made some careless mistakes in my frantic pace.
The bio section was ridiculously easy for me, but Its always been my strong point and i realize I may have received some of the easier questions. Again, Kaplan was my most valuable asset for this section. I did read Schaum's but im not so sure it helped me out on anything in particular. When you are taking the DAt you have this feeling of utter familiarity. The whole test reminded me of a Kaplan practice test. I think alot of the questions were exactly the same from Kaplan (worded a little different but easily recognizable).
OC and GC- super easy. Kaplan is awesome for this. I would say that Kaplan goes as far as over preparing you for this section. I know of a couple careless mistakes i made so you want to focus on reading the question carefully and thinking about any tricks to the problem. For E1/SN1 always....and i mean always look for carbocation rearrangements.
Reading Comprehension: Ive been reading the economist (magazine) for about a year now since I really do enjoy politics and economy so my RC is probably pretty decent. On the test I DID read the passage and I would be lost if I skimmed the passage. This is my advice passed on from a friend: Skip the first part of the RC that lets you read the whole passage before seeing any of the questions. Once you click next past this stage...you will have a window that shows the passage on the top half and 1 question at a time on the lower half of the screen. Read the first question. If the first question is a theme/format/style/inference question regarding the whole passage, guess and mark it for later (usually this is not the case for the first question). So now read the question carefully and begin to read the passage until you arrive at the answer for this question. Answer the question....read the new question. Sometimes you will find the new question was covered in something you already read and you can answer this by looking at the specific section. Otherwise proceed and read untill you come to this answer. Continue like this until you come to the end. Youll find that you remember the questions you skipped and when the answer pops into your head you can just go back and answer them real quick.I finished the whole RC section with 12 minutes to spare. All in all, I only practiced RC on the 4 full length Kaplan practice tests. No individual attention was focused here.
The day of the DAT i bought these foam ear plugs. When i took my test i used these ear plugs (33 db noise reduction) and I wore the sound reducing head phones they give u at the center. WIth both of these, I was in a state of silent bliss. I know from my experience at KAPLAN, that hearing other people type...even faintly...drives me crazy and distracts my attention. This worked out very well.
GL, feel free to PM with any questions. The DAT is not very hard. If i could go back and know exactly how to prepare...I think 2 months of correctly concentrated effor would be enough. I spent around 3 but I was also in school for 2 of the months.
