What’s up guys! I recently took my DAT and I’m so relieved to finally have it over with after months of studying. Throughout my preparation I would constantly come on sites like this and see how others were doing; not only to answer some of my questions, but also give myself some confidence by seeing that others were succeeding. I HIGHLY recommend investing into your peers that have been through this and know all the tips and tricks. That was the best thing that helped me set a schedule for the long and exciting journey ahead. So, with that being said, here’s what I believe helped me succeed the most:
PAT: 23
QR: 21
RC: 18
BIO: 21
GC: 24
OC: 26
TS: 23
AA: 22
Background
It’s important to mention that I am currently in my junior year of undergrad and accomplished this while taking 16 credit hours each semester. I currently hold a 3.97 GPA while also being involved in multiple organizations around campus.
Study Plan
Alright let’s get into my process of studying and the breakdown. Over the summer preceding my junior year I began to investigate potential studying material. DATBOOSTER was what I went with, and I am so happy with that decision. Important to note that I bought the six-month plan over the 4th of July because they were having a big sale on their website (Don’t worry, you can purchase your membership and then put it on hold until you are ready to start it – I started mine mid-October). So, take advantage of that if you can! I decided to do the six-month plan because I am not someone who likes to cram my studying. I also knew that I would be studying for the DAT while also being a full-time student, so the six-month plan just made the most sense to me. It’s also very important to be honest with yourself throughout this whole process. It provides no benefit to be overconfident in yourself in one section just because you’re scared to admit that you’re not that good at general chemistry or whatever it may be. And never compare yourself to others! I know that’s kind of what this whole process is, but don’t let that discourage you. Just do the best that you can do and leave no doubt in your mind that you could have prepared any harder. For myself, I felt like my biology background was pretty poor. So, I decided that starting on September 1st I was going to start preparing. I did this by utilizing the NINJA NERD website and watching a ton of his videos. If you haven’t heard of him, he goes into great detail with awesome visuals and explanations. You can go to the topics tab on his website and go to town on so many different topics regarding anatomy and physiology of different systems and what have you. In any spare time I had, that is how I started my prep from the beginning of September to mid-October when I started my DATBOOSTER membership. Important to note that during that time I would watch the videos, while also taking notes (totally a preference) and then would review some of those notes whenever I had extra time. Honestly though, in the beginning it’s like you’re drinking through a fire hydrant. You’re watching and taking notes over way more content than you’re really studying. The studying and practice will come later. And that’s how I started my DATBOOSTER prep as well. From mid-October to mid-January, I was watching all the DATBOOSTER videos and taking notes over every section. And like I said before, there wasn’t much time to review what I was watching. At this point it’s mostly just consuming as much information as you can. Important to note that there were definitely certain sections that I spent more time on than others because it wasn’t really clicking right away. That’s ok! Remember that you want to be able to at least understand or remember this information for when you do begin reviewing and doing practice problems. Once I had finished all the DATBOOSTER videos I began to go back and review notes. This was a crucial step for me! For about the next month I read through my notes over everything I had just reviewed in order to make sure it was still fresh, while also revisiting certain sections that I struggled with more than others. I also started to do some practice problems here. Mostly pat, gen chem, organic, and qr, but a little bio as well. Again, it’s completely ok to spend a little more time on certain topics if you don’t get it. But remember that you should be spending a pretty even amount of time across all sections (specifically in the total sciences). In the midst of this review (around the second weekend of February) I also began taking a full-length practice DAT every Saturday, leading up to my real exam on April 20. This was the most beneficial part of my studying program for me! It relieved so much stress and prepared me better for what I would see on the actual testing day. DATBOOSTER provides you with 10 full-length practice exams and they’re fantastic. I took the first 5, then took spring break weekend off, and then the last 5, which lead up to the weekend right before the real DAT. By the beginning of March, I started hammering the practice problems for all sections. I would say that I got most of my reading practice from the full-length exams, and same with the PAT questions after I got the hang of it (it took a couple weeks). My schedule from then on would change somewhat based on what I had due each week for my classes, but for the most part I would stick to the same schedule. Monday afternoons and night would mostly be for biology. Tuesday, I had labs all day so at night I would do some bio and gen chem. Wednesday, I also had labs all day so at night I focused on gen chem. Thursday, I didn’t have class so I would usually catch up on sleep, laundry, and other stuff in the mornings and then would do bio, gen chem, and organic all afternoon and night. Fridays I focused on qr, and would maybe do a practice reading passage. Saturday I would get up, drive to campus and find an empty room in the health science or engineering buildings, lock the door and start my full-length practice exam usually by 9:30 am. I would then take a good break after, before doing homework and reviewing my exam that night. Sundays would kind of just be a whatever I needed to get done kind of day. So, I did that for about 11 weeks straight. That was the biggest grind of the whole process. That’s where the stress for me really started to set in, so in order to combat against that, I studied so much I didn’t have time to think about it. As you’ve heard before there are countless ways that you may decide to study and that’s awesome - everyone learns differently. I had friends that did the study in a month plan and did just fine on the actual exam. So, figure out what works for you and stick to that! The worst thing you can do is get overwhelmed and switch something up or put it off because it’s scary to think about at the moment. I got overwhelmed plenty of times but understand that these dental schools know how hard this exam is. They want to see how mentally tough you are and if you can handle hard material under pressure. Keep in mind that there are thousands of other students going through it with you. Trust yourself, you got this!
My Experience on Testing Day
Make sure you’re fully aware of everything that is expected of you on testing day. You don’t want there to be any surprises. I called the testing center I went to and asked questions that I had, and they were super helpful over the phone and in person. There’s also a bunch of different ways you can approach the week leading up to the DAT. I decided that the best thing for me was to keep the same schedule that I had been using the last 10 or so weeks. Make sure you’re not cramming this last week. Not only is that not smart, but it will also just overwhelm you even more. Obviously sleeping the night before is so important, but don’t stress if you can’t fall asleep. Not only is that normal, but you’ll have so much adrenaline flowing on testing day that it will cancel out your drowsiness. I woke up about an hour and half before I had to leave and ate a good breakfast and showered. Once I got there I had to wait over an hour, but that was ok because I was able to adapt to the environment which calmed some nerves for me. And then I took the exam. It went great and I honestly felt somewhat relaxed throughout the whole exam. I took the thirty-minute break in the middle where I ate a snack, went to the bathroom, and studied some qr equations. I went back in about 8 minutes early and just sat and waited for my nerves to settle before I attacked the second half of the exam. And then after I hit submit, it was like the greatest weight ever was lifted off of my shoulders because I could finally say that it had all paid off! After you submit the last qr question you take a quick little survey on your testing experience and then your score pops up on the screen.
What Helped Me the Most (along with some of my tricks)
First off, I highly recommend DATBOOSTER as a study tool for the DAT. Without a doubt it did a fantastic job of preparing me for testing day. I already explained the steps of how I studied, but here I want to go more into what really worked and some tricks I used along the way. Starting with bio, I am not saying I recommend it, but I didn’t study the ecology, or evolution sections at all. There were so many questions for both those sections, and I didn’t enjoy studying that stuff like I did the other sections, so I put all my time into all the other sections. Obviously, your systems and functions topic is going to be well represented in the questions, but embryo, repro, and genetics were other topics that I specifically remember being highly tested over. For gen chem I really just looked over everything. I would say everything is well represented on the real exam. My advice is to obviously know all the equations, but also understand that you’re given a periodic table that also contains some info on it such as Avogadro’s number and other similar type stuff. But check that out and use it to your advantage! Organic was a little unique in my scenario. I was currently taking organic I in the fall and organic II in the spring semester so I really just studied for my lecture and that was good enough to carry over to the DAT. Obviously I would see stuff I hadn’t learned in lecture yet on practice exams, but by the time I took the real DAT I was pretty much through 2 full semesters. I still used the practice problems on booster to review though. For the PAT portion I hammered the practice problems during my “study” phase of my plan, and then after taking full-length tests I just got the hang of it and didn’t review much outside of that anymore. Sometimes if I was struggling to stay focused while doing bio or qr or something, I would do some PAT for “fun” to give my mind a little break while also being productive. I attacked this section a little differently on my practice exams though. For me, the keyhole section was the hardest. Since that was the case (and since it was the first 15 questions of the PAT section) I would skip to question 16 once I entered the PAT section and go through the rest, before returning to the keyhole portion with whatever time I had left. This was a huge breakthrough for me, which led to going from scoring around a 20 and having to guess on the last 5 because of time, to scoring a 22-25 and having 3+ minutes to spare at the end. Finding those little tricks can be huge especially if time is an issue for you. For the reading comprehension portion, I sort of used the skim technique with a little bit of my own twist. I would go through the passage one paragraph at a time and highlight the first couple words, so I knew the gist to the paragraph. I would skim the paragraph very lightly, usually only highlighting if I saw a list of terms, and then I would highlight the last sentence because for whatever reason it would usually hold important information. This is a section that you kind of just get the hang of. Lastly, the qr section was always a struggle for me with time. I think the best advice I can give is that if you read the question, and if you’re not sure, guess and move on. There were always quite a few easy ones in this section so make sure you get those. They’re all worth the same points!
The DAT Compared to Full-Length Practice Exams
DATBOOSTER did a great job of making a representative software that prepares you well, but also pushes you to know more. There were plenty of useful tools that I didn’t even have time to use much because I liked other ones so much. My favorite was that in the practice problems, you could mark any question that you wanted to, from any section, and then it would go to a different location where you could review all the questions you had marked from each separate section. You could then go through and answer them and rank them based on whether you knew it, were reviewing it, or didn’t know it. This was a great tool for me that I used to repetitively see questions that I struggled with and helped me learn them quicker. The full-length practice exams, like I’ve mentioned before, were so helpful in preparing me for the real exam. After taking 10 of them, you also somewhat know what score you can expect come testing day. It’s also SO important to understand that this study plan is a process. Nothing happens overnight, and you 100% get out what you put in. I heard from so many professors that I shouldn’t worry because I’m putting in the work so it will pay off. It’s honestly crazy how it works but it definitely does. So now let’s look at some of my scores early on and compare them to my actual test. Right off the bat, after watching countless videos and filling up 4 notebooks full of notes, with little review mind you, I scored a 15 AA on my first practice exam. Talk about discouraging. From then on, I would go up a little each week and then stay steady for a bit and then repeat that cycle throughout the 10-week period. I wasn’t able to get my bio grade up above a 15 until I started hammering practice problems. Reading comp and qr slowly rose. PAT was up to about a 23 every week after the third practice exam, and gen chem and organic both took some time but eventually went up as well. By the end, the highest scores I had gotten in each category were: PAT: 25, QR: 22, RC: 24, Bio: 19, GC: 20, OC: 22, and AA: 21. It took me all 10 practice exams to accumulate all those scores, with just about none of them ever happening in the same week. But it was all part of the process. As you can see from my actual scores, lots of those went up and some stayed about the same. To start out, I almost felt over prepared after taking the science portion when taking the actual DAT. I flew through it and still had 20 minutes to spare. On the PAT I had about 6 minutes to spare after completing all the questions. The reading section was a mentally challenging section for me on testing day. This part of the DAT was not exactly as I had practiced on DATBOOSTER… but there’s an explanation. On the booster prep the reading portion was very easy to manipulate – highlight and scroll through the reading. On testing day, the prometric reading section was so difficult to manipulate! Everything seemed so delayed, it was super touchy when I wanted to highlight parts, and it wouldn’t hold my spot in the passage when I would go to the next question (something you might understand after taking a practice exam). So really the only reason this portion was more difficult was because DATBOOSTER made their software really nice, and it was much more efficient than the prometric exam. Not that big of a deal, just something that really threw me off in the middle of the exam and I wasn’t expecting it. So, keep that in mind and you’ll be fine! The quantitative reasoning portion was the exact same as every practice exam. Funny to note though that the real DAT was the first time I was able to fully complete this section without just guessing due to time at the end.
Parting Words of Wisdom
Like Stated earlier, I only used Ninja Nerd to touch up on some biology stuff before using DATBOOSTER as my main source of studying. My plan was hard to carry out in the beginning, but after getting the hang of it and making it a priority daily, it just became a routine. I would definitely not consider myself to be crazy smart, I would say I’m driven. This last 7 or so months was an absolute grind that I honestly don’t miss at all. But I accomplished my goal, and I grew so much as a student and in my mental strength. 12-hour study sessions are possible, studying for the DAT while taking classes is possible, and crushing the DAT is possible! Remember that the DAT is only part of what helps you get into dental school. There are so many other pieces that make you a strong candidate. Your life will seem to revolve around your study plan but remember that breaks and time away from studying is crucial. You got this. Trust yourself and try to enjoy the process. Keep your end goal in mind.
PAT: 23
QR: 21
RC: 18
BIO: 21
GC: 24
OC: 26
TS: 23
AA: 22
Background
It’s important to mention that I am currently in my junior year of undergrad and accomplished this while taking 16 credit hours each semester. I currently hold a 3.97 GPA while also being involved in multiple organizations around campus.
Study Plan
Alright let’s get into my process of studying and the breakdown. Over the summer preceding my junior year I began to investigate potential studying material. DATBOOSTER was what I went with, and I am so happy with that decision. Important to note that I bought the six-month plan over the 4th of July because they were having a big sale on their website (Don’t worry, you can purchase your membership and then put it on hold until you are ready to start it – I started mine mid-October). So, take advantage of that if you can! I decided to do the six-month plan because I am not someone who likes to cram my studying. I also knew that I would be studying for the DAT while also being a full-time student, so the six-month plan just made the most sense to me. It’s also very important to be honest with yourself throughout this whole process. It provides no benefit to be overconfident in yourself in one section just because you’re scared to admit that you’re not that good at general chemistry or whatever it may be. And never compare yourself to others! I know that’s kind of what this whole process is, but don’t let that discourage you. Just do the best that you can do and leave no doubt in your mind that you could have prepared any harder. For myself, I felt like my biology background was pretty poor. So, I decided that starting on September 1st I was going to start preparing. I did this by utilizing the NINJA NERD website and watching a ton of his videos. If you haven’t heard of him, he goes into great detail with awesome visuals and explanations. You can go to the topics tab on his website and go to town on so many different topics regarding anatomy and physiology of different systems and what have you. In any spare time I had, that is how I started my prep from the beginning of September to mid-October when I started my DATBOOSTER membership. Important to note that during that time I would watch the videos, while also taking notes (totally a preference) and then would review some of those notes whenever I had extra time. Honestly though, in the beginning it’s like you’re drinking through a fire hydrant. You’re watching and taking notes over way more content than you’re really studying. The studying and practice will come later. And that’s how I started my DATBOOSTER prep as well. From mid-October to mid-January, I was watching all the DATBOOSTER videos and taking notes over every section. And like I said before, there wasn’t much time to review what I was watching. At this point it’s mostly just consuming as much information as you can. Important to note that there were definitely certain sections that I spent more time on than others because it wasn’t really clicking right away. That’s ok! Remember that you want to be able to at least understand or remember this information for when you do begin reviewing and doing practice problems. Once I had finished all the DATBOOSTER videos I began to go back and review notes. This was a crucial step for me! For about the next month I read through my notes over everything I had just reviewed in order to make sure it was still fresh, while also revisiting certain sections that I struggled with more than others. I also started to do some practice problems here. Mostly pat, gen chem, organic, and qr, but a little bio as well. Again, it’s completely ok to spend a little more time on certain topics if you don’t get it. But remember that you should be spending a pretty even amount of time across all sections (specifically in the total sciences). In the midst of this review (around the second weekend of February) I also began taking a full-length practice DAT every Saturday, leading up to my real exam on April 20. This was the most beneficial part of my studying program for me! It relieved so much stress and prepared me better for what I would see on the actual testing day. DATBOOSTER provides you with 10 full-length practice exams and they’re fantastic. I took the first 5, then took spring break weekend off, and then the last 5, which lead up to the weekend right before the real DAT. By the beginning of March, I started hammering the practice problems for all sections. I would say that I got most of my reading practice from the full-length exams, and same with the PAT questions after I got the hang of it (it took a couple weeks). My schedule from then on would change somewhat based on what I had due each week for my classes, but for the most part I would stick to the same schedule. Monday afternoons and night would mostly be for biology. Tuesday, I had labs all day so at night I would do some bio and gen chem. Wednesday, I also had labs all day so at night I focused on gen chem. Thursday, I didn’t have class so I would usually catch up on sleep, laundry, and other stuff in the mornings and then would do bio, gen chem, and organic all afternoon and night. Fridays I focused on qr, and would maybe do a practice reading passage. Saturday I would get up, drive to campus and find an empty room in the health science or engineering buildings, lock the door and start my full-length practice exam usually by 9:30 am. I would then take a good break after, before doing homework and reviewing my exam that night. Sundays would kind of just be a whatever I needed to get done kind of day. So, I did that for about 11 weeks straight. That was the biggest grind of the whole process. That’s where the stress for me really started to set in, so in order to combat against that, I studied so much I didn’t have time to think about it. As you’ve heard before there are countless ways that you may decide to study and that’s awesome - everyone learns differently. I had friends that did the study in a month plan and did just fine on the actual exam. So, figure out what works for you and stick to that! The worst thing you can do is get overwhelmed and switch something up or put it off because it’s scary to think about at the moment. I got overwhelmed plenty of times but understand that these dental schools know how hard this exam is. They want to see how mentally tough you are and if you can handle hard material under pressure. Keep in mind that there are thousands of other students going through it with you. Trust yourself, you got this!
My Experience on Testing Day
Make sure you’re fully aware of everything that is expected of you on testing day. You don’t want there to be any surprises. I called the testing center I went to and asked questions that I had, and they were super helpful over the phone and in person. There’s also a bunch of different ways you can approach the week leading up to the DAT. I decided that the best thing for me was to keep the same schedule that I had been using the last 10 or so weeks. Make sure you’re not cramming this last week. Not only is that not smart, but it will also just overwhelm you even more. Obviously sleeping the night before is so important, but don’t stress if you can’t fall asleep. Not only is that normal, but you’ll have so much adrenaline flowing on testing day that it will cancel out your drowsiness. I woke up about an hour and half before I had to leave and ate a good breakfast and showered. Once I got there I had to wait over an hour, but that was ok because I was able to adapt to the environment which calmed some nerves for me. And then I took the exam. It went great and I honestly felt somewhat relaxed throughout the whole exam. I took the thirty-minute break in the middle where I ate a snack, went to the bathroom, and studied some qr equations. I went back in about 8 minutes early and just sat and waited for my nerves to settle before I attacked the second half of the exam. And then after I hit submit, it was like the greatest weight ever was lifted off of my shoulders because I could finally say that it had all paid off! After you submit the last qr question you take a quick little survey on your testing experience and then your score pops up on the screen.
What Helped Me the Most (along with some of my tricks)
First off, I highly recommend DATBOOSTER as a study tool for the DAT. Without a doubt it did a fantastic job of preparing me for testing day. I already explained the steps of how I studied, but here I want to go more into what really worked and some tricks I used along the way. Starting with bio, I am not saying I recommend it, but I didn’t study the ecology, or evolution sections at all. There were so many questions for both those sections, and I didn’t enjoy studying that stuff like I did the other sections, so I put all my time into all the other sections. Obviously, your systems and functions topic is going to be well represented in the questions, but embryo, repro, and genetics were other topics that I specifically remember being highly tested over. For gen chem I really just looked over everything. I would say everything is well represented on the real exam. My advice is to obviously know all the equations, but also understand that you’re given a periodic table that also contains some info on it such as Avogadro’s number and other similar type stuff. But check that out and use it to your advantage! Organic was a little unique in my scenario. I was currently taking organic I in the fall and organic II in the spring semester so I really just studied for my lecture and that was good enough to carry over to the DAT. Obviously I would see stuff I hadn’t learned in lecture yet on practice exams, but by the time I took the real DAT I was pretty much through 2 full semesters. I still used the practice problems on booster to review though. For the PAT portion I hammered the practice problems during my “study” phase of my plan, and then after taking full-length tests I just got the hang of it and didn’t review much outside of that anymore. Sometimes if I was struggling to stay focused while doing bio or qr or something, I would do some PAT for “fun” to give my mind a little break while also being productive. I attacked this section a little differently on my practice exams though. For me, the keyhole section was the hardest. Since that was the case (and since it was the first 15 questions of the PAT section) I would skip to question 16 once I entered the PAT section and go through the rest, before returning to the keyhole portion with whatever time I had left. This was a huge breakthrough for me, which led to going from scoring around a 20 and having to guess on the last 5 because of time, to scoring a 22-25 and having 3+ minutes to spare at the end. Finding those little tricks can be huge especially if time is an issue for you. For the reading comprehension portion, I sort of used the skim technique with a little bit of my own twist. I would go through the passage one paragraph at a time and highlight the first couple words, so I knew the gist to the paragraph. I would skim the paragraph very lightly, usually only highlighting if I saw a list of terms, and then I would highlight the last sentence because for whatever reason it would usually hold important information. This is a section that you kind of just get the hang of. Lastly, the qr section was always a struggle for me with time. I think the best advice I can give is that if you read the question, and if you’re not sure, guess and move on. There were always quite a few easy ones in this section so make sure you get those. They’re all worth the same points!
The DAT Compared to Full-Length Practice Exams
DATBOOSTER did a great job of making a representative software that prepares you well, but also pushes you to know more. There were plenty of useful tools that I didn’t even have time to use much because I liked other ones so much. My favorite was that in the practice problems, you could mark any question that you wanted to, from any section, and then it would go to a different location where you could review all the questions you had marked from each separate section. You could then go through and answer them and rank them based on whether you knew it, were reviewing it, or didn’t know it. This was a great tool for me that I used to repetitively see questions that I struggled with and helped me learn them quicker. The full-length practice exams, like I’ve mentioned before, were so helpful in preparing me for the real exam. After taking 10 of them, you also somewhat know what score you can expect come testing day. It’s also SO important to understand that this study plan is a process. Nothing happens overnight, and you 100% get out what you put in. I heard from so many professors that I shouldn’t worry because I’m putting in the work so it will pay off. It’s honestly crazy how it works but it definitely does. So now let’s look at some of my scores early on and compare them to my actual test. Right off the bat, after watching countless videos and filling up 4 notebooks full of notes, with little review mind you, I scored a 15 AA on my first practice exam. Talk about discouraging. From then on, I would go up a little each week and then stay steady for a bit and then repeat that cycle throughout the 10-week period. I wasn’t able to get my bio grade up above a 15 until I started hammering practice problems. Reading comp and qr slowly rose. PAT was up to about a 23 every week after the third practice exam, and gen chem and organic both took some time but eventually went up as well. By the end, the highest scores I had gotten in each category were: PAT: 25, QR: 22, RC: 24, Bio: 19, GC: 20, OC: 22, and AA: 21. It took me all 10 practice exams to accumulate all those scores, with just about none of them ever happening in the same week. But it was all part of the process. As you can see from my actual scores, lots of those went up and some stayed about the same. To start out, I almost felt over prepared after taking the science portion when taking the actual DAT. I flew through it and still had 20 minutes to spare. On the PAT I had about 6 minutes to spare after completing all the questions. The reading section was a mentally challenging section for me on testing day. This part of the DAT was not exactly as I had practiced on DATBOOSTER… but there’s an explanation. On the booster prep the reading portion was very easy to manipulate – highlight and scroll through the reading. On testing day, the prometric reading section was so difficult to manipulate! Everything seemed so delayed, it was super touchy when I wanted to highlight parts, and it wouldn’t hold my spot in the passage when I would go to the next question (something you might understand after taking a practice exam). So really the only reason this portion was more difficult was because DATBOOSTER made their software really nice, and it was much more efficient than the prometric exam. Not that big of a deal, just something that really threw me off in the middle of the exam and I wasn’t expecting it. So, keep that in mind and you’ll be fine! The quantitative reasoning portion was the exact same as every practice exam. Funny to note though that the real DAT was the first time I was able to fully complete this section without just guessing due to time at the end.
Parting Words of Wisdom
Like Stated earlier, I only used Ninja Nerd to touch up on some biology stuff before using DATBOOSTER as my main source of studying. My plan was hard to carry out in the beginning, but after getting the hang of it and making it a priority daily, it just became a routine. I would definitely not consider myself to be crazy smart, I would say I’m driven. This last 7 or so months was an absolute grind that I honestly don’t miss at all. But I accomplished my goal, and I grew so much as a student and in my mental strength. 12-hour study sessions are possible, studying for the DAT while taking classes is possible, and crushing the DAT is possible! Remember that the DAT is only part of what helps you get into dental school. There are so many other pieces that make you a strong candidate. Your life will seem to revolve around your study plan but remember that breaks and time away from studying is crucial. You got this. Trust yourself and try to enjoy the process. Keep your end goal in mind.
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