ASDA Dental Dose Blog

Before diving into all of the details of the exam, it is important to remember that it alone does not

determine your acceptance into dental school. It is an important aspect of your application to

demonstrate your understanding of standardized areas of study placed by the ADA, but a single

test will not determine your potential as an eventual dental student.

How Long Should I Study For?

No two students are alike when it comes to study habits. We all possess different learning techniques that grant us the educational excellence we strive for. The one shared aspect between all of these methods is effort. You cannot expect to achieve anything if you do not invest every bit of your strength. Your motivation to study will be at its peak during the first month of studying. Use that to your advantage. I spent the first four weeks studying eight hours per day. They were split into two four-hour sessions with a break in between that lasted from one hour to an hour and a half. I would complete all of the lecture videos that were on my calendar during the first session, then finish the practice problems for the corresponding lectures during the second session. That calendar was provided by the DAT Bootcamp “Study Schedule.” You have to input the days you wish to take off from studying, and it will organize all of the content into the three months of your membership. Make sure to take at least one day off each week; burning yourself out will only result in failure to complete the schedule and having to push your test date further back. I personally took two days off each week, and made sure to do something during those two days to take my mind off the DAT completely. Before my weekly breaks, I would go back and review the sections where I was not entirely confident, and redo the practice problems that corresponded with them. This ensured that the information was brought into my long-term memory, rather than leaving my short-term memory as soon as my laptop was turned off.

The second month was a very different story. I cut down the study sessions to three to six hours per day, and began to lose the steady sleep schedule. It’s normal to reach a point where you physically can’t study. You might not be in the right mental state to learn about embryonic development, so do not force yourself. Take the day off instead of watching lectures just to checkoff a box from your schedule. Your schedule can be flexible, you can move things around, but never fall behind. If you took Tuesday off, then study on Saturday to catch up. If you are unable to focus on the practice problems at 8 am, start studying in the evening. The number of hours you spend studying is not what’s going to get you the score you desire, but studying efficiently will. Practice problems are very important during the second month, as well as redoing them multiple times to make sure you’re not getting the same question wrong twice. Bootcamp is set up to give you fewer of the simpler questions and focus on the complex ones, which is beneficial because the actual exam has more of the straightforward questions than the complicated ones. Make the most of the question generators, as there will be questions that are almost identical to them on the DAT.

The third month is split into two sections, two weeks each. It was also the month that I would either only take one day off per week or study for all seven days to ensure I had enough time to cover all of the content. The first section should be a review of all the material you covered over the past two months. While doing this, you will have a couple of biology lectures left over, as it has over twenty units to complete. I found that the best way to review all of the material was to make a summary for each unit in each subject. I would explain all of the concepts as if I were writing the review for someone who knows nothing of the subject. I would ask myself questions, then answer them with the content and write it all down. Reading over the slides multiple times will not benefit you in any way; you must either write them down or draw diagrams with all of the details that were taught. It is also helpful to have a page for all of the things that the instructors from Bootcamp told you to memorize; there are a lot of those. Make sure to write down all of the mnemonics and have them memorized as well, as some questions will come straight from them. If you spent the first two months reviewing the content a week or so after learning it, then these two weeks shouldn’t be as hectic as they sound. That’s why it’s important to understand that YOU CANNOT CRAM FOR THE DAT. If cramming was the key to getting you the A’s you wanted so far, then you have to find a new strategy as soon as possible because it will not work for the DAT. As you are making these reviews, you cannot forget to do the practice problems. Take advantage of the question generators, re-do them as much as you please; you can never be overprepared for this exam. The second two weeks of the final month should be focused on practice tests. DAT Bootcamp offers ten full-length practice tests, take them all. This is where I recommend that you not follow the schedule that Bootcamp has, as it tells you not to take the first five tests fully and split the sections off into a couple of days, and take the last five as full-length tests. It will be of greater benefit if you take all ten full-length tests without splitting off the sections. It is also essential that you take these tests at the same time as your actual scheduled exams. Exams usually start at eight am, depending on your testing center, so make sure to start each exam at the same time. This programs your mind to lock into testing mode at the proper time. Taking these tests around every other day at eight am will ease you into thinking of the actual exam as just another practice test. When test day comes, you have read all of the instructions ten times, you will have figured out what kind of questions to mark and comeback to later to save time, and you will have understood what to do on your break to start the Reading Comprehension section with a clear mind. It’s important to go back and review the full exam after you see your score, but take an hour break after finishing the test before starting the review. This ensures a clear mind and minimizes burnout during the day. Go back to your notes and review the sections that you missed on the exam, and understand why you got the question wrong.

There are a couple of details about each section on the DAT that I wanted to focus on that may be beneficial. Starting with the most dreaded section, in my opinion, the Perceptual Ability Test. The PAT is the only section that cannot be learned. If you want to master the PAT, then you have to practice every single day. I made the mistake of pushing it off until the very last month, which is why it was my lowest score, 420. If you want a decent score for this section, then you must start watching the help videos that Bootcamp provides and practice with the generators from day one. You need to spend all three months practicing. The best way to practice is to do fifteen of each portion of the PAT every day, to mimic the actual exam. That is ninety questions total every day, and it is essential to succeed. Now moving on to my highest score of 590, biology. There is a lot of information, and there are ten units on detailed anatomy that you have to memorize. Drawing out the diagrams, writing out the mnemonics, and explaining the content to someone with great detail are all ways to do well on this section. Don’t skip over any units; make sure to have a surface-level understanding of everything that may show up on test day. Breadth over depth is crucial to keep in mind when studying the biology portion. As for chemistry and organic chemistry, they are a lot simpler than the courses you have taken at UH. My chemistry was a 440and organic chemistry was at a 510. Professor Mike’s videos will tell you exactly what you need to know, and in the most straightforward way possible. Reading comprehension is mainly about being able to read all three passages and answer all of the questions in the time they give you. I tried to use the skimming through the passage and answering questions method but would end up with very low scores on the practice tests. Try to read all of the passages that Bootcamp has to offer to enhance your reading rate and understand the kind of questions that you will encounter on test day. Also, make sure to use the highlighting tool for the passages to get into the habit of highlighting things that you think will be asked about. For quantitative reasoning, be sure to do a couple of practice problems every day, and focus on the word problems. I scored a 450 on both reading comprehension and quantitative reasoning. The actual exam had more word problems than any of the practice tests I took. You are also allowed to look at your notes and have access to your phone during your break before the reading comprehension and quantitative reasoning sections, so make sure to have your formula sheet with you to look over before going back to resume your test.

After finishing everything you need, I recommend you take the test as soon as possible.  Unless you have photographic memory, you will forget a lot of the details you’ve spent months striving to obtain if you wait too long before taking the test. It is not a simple step to take, it’s terrifying, but it must be done. Nothing beats the sigh of relief after walking out of the testing center, and as far away as that feeling may seem to you now, it will arrive before you know it.

This Article was written by Asmaa Rasheed:

I went to 10 schools in 12 years. I’ve lived in four countries. I convinced my brother to join the pre-dental track, he was pre-med.

I took a creative writing class in high school and like writing short stories.

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