For those looking to become dental school students, the Dental Admission Test (DAT) is an important part of the process that probably creates plenty of nerves and anxiety. The DAT is designed specifically to provide educational programs specializing in dental treatments some means of looking at applicants and figuring out what their potential for success actually is.
The DAT is administered by testing centers all through the United States and Canada, including U.S. territories. The idea here is to help figure out the students most likely to succeed and figure out those who seem less likely to get through. The DAT itself is made up with a large number of multiple choice test questions.
The questions are broken into four particular sections including:
– Perceptual ability
– Quantitative reasoning
– Reading comprehension
– Survey of natural sciences
One interesting thing to note is that with the DAT a student needs to know how measurements work both in the U.S. system of measurements as well as the metric system.
In addition to this questions can cover biology, general chemistry, organic chemistry, and a variety of different topics that full under reading, math, data analysis, and perception. Because of this, students should be prepared and there are many preparatory courses focusing specifically on getting ready for this test.
The DAT is required by every dental school and is one of several prerequisites for getting into any licensed dental school in the United States.
Preparation
Prepping for the DAT is important to help increase the odds prior to a test. It’s worth noting that the DAT guide is not only available but it is also required reading before moving forward with the process. While there is no officially endorsed DAT Preparation course, there are multiple prep courses out there for this test and it makes a lot of sense to take some of these courses in order to properly prepare.
These can involve study guides, mock tests, and there are even some parts of preparation courses that focus on creating a test taking scenario in order to prepare you for how the testing experience is going to feel. There’s no question that the dental admission test can be a challenge and with a test that is so through and covers so many areas just to make someone eligible for dentist school.
Unique Features of the DAT
There’s little question that the DAT sticks out compared to some other tests. These are reported as a scale score. This scale score is a unique grading system specifically developed for this test because there are no raw scores and the scale score is NOT the same as a percentage or percentile score.
The system upon which these scores have been tested has been developed over decades and has created a very good system that has proven to be consistently reliable when it comes to judging the potential of a student to succeed or fail in a dental program and lets the schools make their call accordingly.
Knowing this will help individuals increase their chance of being prepared to succeed.