DrStudentDentist

Yipes, I got busy learning German these last few days and didn’t make time to post. Hrm, I see how lack of time can be a problem when dental school starts. Well, you guys can send me hate mail if I don’t post. How’s that for keeping me honest?

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If you have yourself a set of material - not too much since much of it is redundant. For instance, I had the Kaplan blue book but it wasn’t right for me - too boring - so I studied from other material. Better to find a good set that covers the essentials and then learn it well. Too little and it doesn’t cover everything. Too much and it’s overwhelming.

Like I’ve written before, have a set date to work with and space your Topscore & Achiever exams backwards from the test date. I’ve put together a mock schedule in the below thumbnail.

This wasn’t my exact schedule but you get the idea. I made sure to train my body to sit through the hours straight through with a 15 minute break. If you think you can handle it, obviously feel free to pack the practice exams tighter and closer to the test date but there’s a fine line between grinding and burning out. I didn’t want to risk it since studying was still rather new to me.

When I studied, I left 2-3 days between practice tests to go through my wrong answers. Mostly to sit through the PAT section 3-D models or learn some concept I didn’t get in the sciences. Get me? Concepts, not actual problems. Don’t get hung up on a wrong problem but if you see that you consistently get Claisen condensation problems wrong then you need to learn how to do it cause you didn’t the first time around. The only way to weed out your weakness is to do enough problems to either see a pattern in your mistakes. If there is no pattern in your mistakes then you’re being careless and that’s what you’ll have to work on.

Aside from practice exams spacing which is something I think you guys should implement, the way to study is up to you. If what you’re doing works, don’t fix what ain’t broke. The DAT is not the time to start experimenting with new fangled studying methods so just have some faith and start burning through the material. At this point, it’s just about putting the time in.

Addendem: I did print out the math problems from Topscore (yes, 1 problem/page) and worked through them by hand. For Achiever, I manually copied and pasted them into a Word doc and printed that out (a lot of  Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V but it got the job done). I was being overly cautious since math hasn’t been my strength. I also did Destroyer problems and whatever I got wrong, I flagged with a Post-It. Then I concentrated on those. That’s how I weeded out my weaknesses.