Best Biology resources for Canadian DAT?

[dentalnerd]

I have cliffs AP 3rd ed, Dr. Romanos Dynamite Bio notes, and Feralis DAT Bootcamp bio notes. 

I'm planning to do practice questions from DATready, IQ publications and DAT destroyer. 

What resource did people find best? I'm writing in November2018 but i'm crunched for time due to full time school with a 6 course load and work. 

And could people share how they studied for the bio section please?

[Ravenjats]

I wrote my DAT in 2017 and I found that Cliff's AP 3rd and Feralis' notes are more than enough to cover the material for the DAT. 

I primarily used DAT Bootcamp for PAT and RC, however the practice tests were a useful checkpoint to assess my progress for biology and chemistry as well. They have multiple full-length tests you can practice with, as well as single section tests you can do as well. If I remember correctly, I think they have 10 single section tests. 

DAT Destroyer was also fairly useful, however, I used it moreso for the chemistry section as opposed to the biology section. It's fairly expensive, and I don't think it's entirely necessary. However, if you can find a used one for a cheaper price (~$100), I'd go for it. 

With regards to how I studied for the biology section, I made chapter notes for Cliff's and reviewed them fairly regularly. I'd do the practice questions in DAT Bootcamp and Destroyer to assess how I was doing throughout. I didn't use Feralis' chapter notes at all, but the taxonomy sheet was extremely useful. I generally left that one as is and just studied it off of the page. 

[Starburst]

I personally scored 26AA and 24PAT on the 2018 Feb DAT. It honestly really comes down to how you prepare and the effort you put. To give you some perspective how I studied, I went over Chad's videos once, the Kaplan book twice, and all of my notes that I made several times. After going through the notes, I tried doing a practice test every 2 weeks. For practice tests, I personally used DATCrusher which was the primary practice tests that I used and it was an amazing resource for me. Bootcamp is also good but I didn't use it too much after I got decent scores solely using it the first time.

@DentalNerdZ Also be careful using Ferralis Notes because it didn't cover every topic for the Canadian DAT. There were a chunk of questions on my exam that Ferralis Notes never covered when I wrote the first time. And it has a lot of unnecessary information that you don't need to know.

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[dentalnerd]

20 hours ago, Ravenjats said:

I wrote my DAT in 2017 and I found that Cliff's AP 3rd and Feralis' notes are more than enough to cover the material for the DAT. 

I primarily used DAT Bootcamp for PAT and RC, however the practice tests were a useful checkpoint to assess my progress for biology and chemistry as well. They have multiple full-length tests you can practice with, as well as single section tests you can do as well. If I remember correctly, I think they have 10 single section tests. 

DAT Destroyer was also fairly useful, however, I used it moreso for the chemistry section as opposed to the biology section. It's fairly expensive, and I don't think it's entirely necessary. However, if you can find a used one for a cheaper price (~$100), I'd go for it. 

With regards to how I studied for the biology section, I made chapter notes for Cliff's and reviewed them fairly regularly. I'd do the practice questions in DAT Bootcamp and Destroyer to assess how I was doing throughout. I didn't use Feralis' chapter notes at all, but the taxonomy sheet was extremely useful. I generally left that one as is and just studied it off of the page. 

Thank you so much for replying! Did you type your notes or write them out by hand?

[dentalnerd]

2 hours ago, Starburst said:

I personally scored 26AA and 24PAT on the 2018 Feb DAT. It honestly really comes down to how you prepare and the effort you put. To give you some perspective how I studied, I went over Chad's videos once, the Kaplan book twice, and all of my notes that I made several times. After going through the notes, I tried doing a practice test every 2 weeks. For practice tests, I personally used DATCrusher which was the primary practice tests that I used and it was an amazing resource for me. Bootcamp is also good but I didn't use it too much after I got decent scores solely using it the first time.

@DentalNerdZ Also be careful using Ferralis Notes because it didn't cover every topic for the Canadian DAT. There were a chunk of questions on my exam that Ferralis Notes never covered when I wrote the first time. And it has a lot of unnecessary information that you don't need to know.

•  

Congrats on the scores and thank you for the warning!  I'm using the free version of chads videos at https://courses.chemistryprep.com/enrollments do you think this will suffice + doing practice questions for chem? 

 

How did you study for bio specifically? Did you use cliffs notes at all and did you type notes or write them by hand?

[Starburst]

3 hours ago, DentalNerdZ said:

Congrats on the scores and thank you for the warning!  I'm using the free version of chads videos at https://courses.chemistryprep.com/enrollments do you think this will suffice + doing practice questions for chem? 

 

How did you study for bio specifically? Did you use cliffs notes at all and did you type notes or write them by hand?

I used the subscription one, I don't remember exactly which one because a friend purchased it and I shared it with her. I did go over the relevant chapters in both the Cliff's 3rd Edition and the kaplans book. But before I started studying, I wrote down all of the topics that are covered on the DAT on a piece of paper (Found here: https://www.cda-adc.ca/en/becoming/dat/information/) and read the relevant chapters while hand-writing my own notes. Every few days I would review my notes while creating new notes over a period of time. Everything I wrote down, I knew solid by the time of the DAT.

[Fentist]

What are the datready books like? 

[paper]

On 9/1/2018 at 11:20 AM, Ravenjats said:

I wrote my DAT in 2017 and I found that Cliff's AP 3rd and Feralis' notes are more than enough to cover the material for the DAT. 

I primarily used DAT Bootcamp for PAT and RC, however the practice tests were a useful checkpoint to assess my progress for biology and chemistry as well. They have multiple full-length tests you can practice with, as well as single section tests you can do as well. If I remember correctly, I think they have 10 single section tests. 

DAT Destroyer was also fairly useful, however, I used it moreso for the chemistry section as opposed to the biology section. It's fairly expensive, and I don't think it's entirely necessary. However, if you can find a used one for a cheaper price (~$100), I'd go for it. 

With regards to how I studied for the biology section, I made chapter notes for Cliff's and reviewed them fairly regularly. I'd do the practice questions in DAT Bootcamp and Destroyer to assess how I was doing throughout. I didn't use Feralis' chapter notes at all, but the taxonomy sheet was extremely useful. I generally left that one as is and just studied it off of the page. 

I noticed that Cliff's AP 3rd edition does not go that deep into vertebrate anatomy and physiology. Would you say that going over Cliff's AP 3rd ed is enough to cover that section?

[smilebright]

I used Kaplan book and yes did do handwritten notes for all the studying to solidify the learning.

 

[Ravenjats]

On 9/2/2018 at 9:30 AM, DentalNerdZ said:

Thank you so much for replying! Did you type your notes or write them out by hand?

I personally typed them out, but that was purely because of time constraints. If I had the time to, I would have preferred to write them out as I feel that I retain information better that way. But in the end, choose whichever method works best for you. 

 

On 9/3/2018 at 9:45 PM, r=vd said:

I noticed that Cliff's AP 3rd edition does not go that deep into vertebrate anatomy and physiology. Would you say that going over Cliff's AP 3rd ed is enough to cover that section?

I can't say for certain. I also used DAT Bootcamp as a resource, so I may be mixing up some of the information covered, but I felt like I had a decent understanding of those two sections. Remember that the DAT isn't extremely in-depth; most of the questions they ask are simple multiple choice questions and you have to do answer retrieval. They're not going to be asking you to write out in-depth paragraphs and short answer questions. 

I certainly could have gone to my physiology/anatomy notes from the class I took in university, but I felt that my time was better spent practicing PAT and RC.