Your guide to the DAT’s reading comprehension (RC) section

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When you take the Dental Admission Test (DAT), you will need to demonstrate your ability to read critically on the reading comprehension (RC) section. We’ve compiled a complete guide to RC, with tips and tricks for scoring high. Read on for an overview of the RC section, our advice for how to prepare, and a list of strategies you can experiment with!

What to expect

The RC section is the third section of the DAT, following the Survey of Natural Sciences and the Perceptual Ability Test. You will have one hour to answer 50 questions. You will usually have three passages, each containing 16–17 questions. All of the questions will be multiple choice, and all of the passages will be related to science in some way. As with all sections of the DAT, you can skip around as you wish.

Common RC question types

There are many different classes of RC questions. Here are some common ones:

1. Overall comprehension/main point. These questions test whether you understood the overall point of the passage and grasped the author’s main argument.
2. Detail. These questions ask about specific details in the passage. These details are usually explicitly stated somewhere in the passage — all you have to do is find the line containing the answer! This is a very common question type on the DAT.
3. Tone. These questions ask about the author’s tone. How does the author feel about the topic — passionate? neutral? angry? optimistic? Determining the tone of the author requires a bit of reading between the lines.
4. Author’s purpose. Like tone questions, author’s purpose questions require a bit of reading between the lines. After reading, you should have a sense of why the author chose to write the passage. Maybe it was to make an argument, to convince the reader of a certain viewpoint, or to provide information about a topic.
5. Function. These questions are a bit like author’s purpose questions. Function questions will ask you determine why an author included a certain word or sentence. Maybe it was to offer an example, mention a counterexample, or provide evidence supporting a claim.

How to practice and prepare

As with all DAT sections, practice is absolutely key! The good news about the RC section is that many of correct answers are explicitly stated in the passages. However, because these articles are often quite long, many test-takers find themselves in a time crunch, struggling to answer all 50 questions within the allotted 60 minutes. That’s why being able comprehend the overall structure and purpose of a text quickly is so critical. Speed and comprehension are cultivated through practice and preparation. Here are some of our suggestions for how to do just that:

1. Read scientific articles every week. We strongly recommend incorporating this into your DAT study schedule! The more you can read, the better, but if you’re pressed for time, even reading just a couple of articles every week can be advantageous! National Geographic and Scientific American are both great options. Choose a random article, and focus on reading quickly while still understanding the passage’s main points and/or arguments.
2. Simulate the real DAT RC section. This is the best way to prepare yourself for the real DAT. CrackDAT.com offers 10 full-length, realistic, timed practice RC tests. Intersperse these throughout your studying!
3. Test out different strategies. In the next section, we’ll explain a few different strategies for attacking the passages and questions. There are many active reading strategies you can try out, regardless of which overall reading strategy you choose. For example, the DAT allows you to highlight texts. Try highlighting words or sections that appear particularly important while reading. You might also try taking very brief notes about each paragraph that you can refer to as you later answer the questions. That is, for each paragraph, you might jot down a few words that’ll help jog your memory later.

Putting it all together, imagine you were reading the paragraph below (from Scientific American — “Could Mitochondria Be the Key to a Healthy Brain?” by Diana Kwon):

“Wallace is particularly interested in how mitochondria might contribute to autism spectrum disorder. Studies by several research teams have revealed that mitochondrial diseases, a mix of symptoms caused by defects in the organelle, are much more prevalent in people with autism (5 percent) than in the general population (about 0.01 percent). An additional 30 percent to 50 percent of children with autism show signs of mitochondrial dysfunction, such as abnormal levels of certain byproducts generated by cellular respiration, the process through which ATP is produced.”

You might write down “autism link” in your notes and move on. If you later encounter a question about mitochondrial diseases and autism, you’ll know where to look back.

An assortment of reading strategies

Finally, we’ll cover a few strategies you can use to attack the RC section as a whole (basically, to decide what to do first). There’s no one “ideal” strategy. Test out various strategies and see what works best for YOU.

1. Preview the questions first. A pro of this strategy is that it primes you during your reading — having skimmed the questions before diving into the passage, you’ll have an idea of what to look for while you read. A con is that this may consume too much time.
2. Do a somewhat thorough read and mark-up first. If previewing the questions first isn’t your preferred method, read the passage as rapidly as you can while still being thorough and careful enough to understand the main takeaways. If it helps you, use some of the strategies from the previous section, like highlighting and notetaking, to aid your comprehension. Then, jump into the questions. You may need to refer back to the passage for some but not all of the questions.
3. Dive right into answering the questions. Finally, rather than reading the entire question set or the entire passage first, you can try reading each question and searching for the correct answer at the same time. For example, if the first question asks about a specific date, you can skim the passage extremely quickly until you find mention of that date. Then, read some sentences for context and find your answer. Then move on to the next question. For some people, this method is extremely efficient, but for others, it can be too stressful or can lead to a lack of understanding of the passage’s overarching or more subtle themes.

The RC section, like all DAT sections, is about practice and testing different strategies. With Crack the DAT, you can have confidence that you have all the tools you need to ace your RC section. We wish you the best of luck!

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