DAT study tips BIO and CHM

The biggest topic on November DAT and February DAT

The way I studied for the November DAT was very rigorous and very different from what bootcamp or crusher advised me to do. I am not a fast learner, and some of the material that was being covered in biology or chemistry was quite complex and I needed to dedicate more time, like more than a day on a single chapter. I remember I studied the embryology section of the Canadian DAT for like a week, and when I came back to review it, I was still struggling to remember the details of this section, and I also remember that on the November DAT of 2019, the content of the questions was heavily based on the embryology section, 3 questions for sure was from this section. The questions were also very complex, not as simple as what stage does the blastocyst form? It was based on an experiment and you had to deduce what stage the experiment was at in order to find out what types of cells they will be formed. There was another question that was based on inhibition of Neurulation at certain stages and you had to find out what would become inhibited and not be formed by the end of the experiment. Also, at what stage it would stop, what the final structure would be, a neural tube or a neural plate? I have attached links from khan academy which I think are simple and easy to follow, I also watched Khan Academy videos like a thousand times with subtitles to understand what was going on with the cells at different stages.

In my opinion biology was very challenging, Neurulation and embryology for me was a new concept and I had a really hard time memorizing it. Moreover, the section on biodiversity was really long, I had to memorize the content 4 times and come up with pneumonic to try and remember all the phyla.

Physiology – such a huge chapter, so many organ systems, and so many things that you have to memorize, and all the calendars on bootcamp and crusher indicate spend one day on each chapter, I don’t understand how we can memorize all that chapter in just one day.

This was my biggest problem with these resources, they caused me so much anxiety thinking that I really should be spending 1 day on such a vast and new topic, thinking that other students are going faster than me, whilst I am taking 1 week to finish only one chapter. This is not representative of all the students, some students are exceptional, some have taken courses that year covering the exact same material, and they can easily go over the material and take 1 or 2 days. For me, I had taken Physiology 300 and 301 at UofT the year prior to my DAT, it was kind of review but who can remember every detail about the different organ systems. So, my advice is go at your own pace, and switch between sections for biology and chemistry weekly, not daily. In my opinion it is unnecessary and confusing. This way works better as it allows you to process information and not to be confused with different subject matters, the questions for biology and chemistry are separated so no need to study them all at once.

I believe with my second try I really personalized my study habits, I became more comfortable with what I thought would work best for me. I managed to review biology twice, and chemistry once. So, having to understand what worked best for me, I was able to score higher, I received a score of 25 on my Bio section.

The chemistry section, what you have to wrap your head around is that you cannot just memorize things about chemistry, you have to do problems, hard problems with lots of calculations, not easy round calculations, practice with DAT Destroyer, to really ace the chemistry section. The best thing you can do is do practice problems to get comfortable with numbers, and find short cuts in your calculation process. Also, come up with a strategy, as you are doing practice questions. For chemistry time management is hard especially if you get nervous like me, and forget how to do simple problems, like finding moles. So, I realized that in the chemistry section there are around 18 questions that are content based or has really easy calculations. So I would go over questions and find those and answer them quickly, then I would come back to the hard calculation problems to begin answering them as fast as I could. This allowed me to save time, make sure I at least answered some of the questions, and not to waste my time thinking and calculating something that I was not sure about, and made me more calm and confident to return to those more challenging questions. For example, I know for a fact, the correct answer to one of the questions was not included in one of the multiple choices, and having to waste time trying to solve it was a time sink, with the process of elimination you could have easily solved for it at the end without losing your time. So personalize your study habits, reach out to us ask us how we can make your study habits more relevant to what you need to focus on. let us help you to study more effectively, and to help you score higher on your DAT.

https://www.chadsprep.com/chads-general-chemistry-videos/

These videos helped me out a lot with my general chemistry review!