Tehaum (@onemissiondmd) recently passed his INBDE and we asked him to give us a breakdown on how he did it!
What I Used:
- Mental Dental (Dr. Ryan Gross)
- Dental Mastery
- INBDE Bootcamp
- Mosby Book
- Tufts Pharmacology
How I Used Everything:
Month #1: Preliminary Exposure
Dr. Ryan’s resource of Mental Dental was the resource synonymous to Course Saver: Chad Videos for the DAT. He has great videos that cover all subjects and topics to the extent the board exam expects students to be familiar with. I started all the Mental Dental videos in March and took notes and completed all of the lectures. Each video has a subsequent questions video, I made sure to do them all as I would finish each video! Make sure to complete those because many were similar to Bootcamp and actual board questions.
During this time, I also used the Mosby Boards (synonymous to Cliff's AP Bio for DAT prep) book to brush up over topics and terminologies as well as Tufts Pharmacology. I did not read the entire book, but I did make sure to read over the more challenging topics and things I know I needed a decent refresher on. Tufts was a great resource because Pharmacology is a very commonly tested topic on the exam. Tufts has an immense amount of questions which helped solidify the material from Mental Dental. They have conceptual, mechanistic, and calculation questions! I didn’t do them all but the ones I did were absolutely helpful!
Month #2: PRACTICE
Initially I used Dental Mastery because that’s just what all the upperclassmen who graduated in 2021 mentioned using. Now, if you studied for the DAT, you’ve probably heard about the DAT Destroyer. Dental Mastery is synonymous to the DAT Destroyer. Many say the DAT Destroyer is overkill and Mastery is kind of similar. Me being Tehaum, because I know what works for me and what doesn’t, I knew I needed to push myself and see all there was I could potentially be thrown at on the exam. While I studied with Mastery, I came across topics that I had never heard of before in school and came across topics that weren’t mentioned in Mental Dental. I kept going and marking questions that I wasn’t sure of and made a notes sheet with random facts, link in the description of my video. My goal was to do exactly 100 mastery questions a day and about 50 bootcamp questions a day. Once I got through about 2,200 mastery questions I was just burnt out and stopped, and solely focused on Bootcamp.
Every time I finished the days worth of questions, I’d revisit my notes on those topics and I would review about 2 full Mental Dental lectures to completion every single day. I wanted to make sure I could remember the material so throughout the day I’d always manage my time wisely. The moment I found out I had a patient cancellation, I went straight to the library. Time management is super tough especially if you are at a school like mine that doesn’t allow dedicated time off to study.
Conveniently for me, by March-April, INBDE Bootcamp released a solid amount of questions which were actually really really good questions. My goal for Bootcamp changed to 100 a day. I would go over all the questions and mark the ones that were more challenging so that I could re-visit them later. My ultimate goal was to finish all of the provided questions at least 5-7 days prior to my exam day. I decided to do this so that I could re-visit all of those marked questions weeks later to prove to myself if I knew the material or not.
My Final Thoughts and Advice
INBDE Bootcamp has a 10 question a day warm up generator to get a feel for how this amazing resource is laid out. Not only that, but you can then see all the questions you marked again at a glance. Bootcamp is the best resource out there in my honest opinion. The questions are clearly laid out, have amazing pictures and diagrams, and are representative to the style of questions on the actual board. I got some similar questions on my actual board that I saw on Bootcamp.
Do not go into overdrive the week before. If you followed the schedule I shared (link in video description) or any other schedule, you would have gone over more than 3000 practice questions which is a lot to get a gauge of what type of material you need to hone your studying in on mostly. Last few days before your exam just keep reviewing your lectures, notes, and marked questions.
Mark your questions that you know you got down for sure and the ones you aren't so good at yet PROPERLY! To save yourself time and to efficiently focus on things that require more time to study, make sure to take a few seconds to think. Did I get that question right off of guessing or actual understanding of the concepts? If you guessed you might wanna mark it as yellow just to be safe to make sure if you really know it once you eventually visit back to it again.
On exam day, you will have multiple sections that you have to do with breaks in between each of them. Now once you finish a section, you can’t go back to a completed section. However, during your breaks, you are allowed to go to your lockers and review any and all study materials. This was really clutch because as I finished each section, I made sure to quickly revise certain topics b/c odds are you might get repeated questions on different sections that you had before. So if you know you didn’t answer correctly the first time, you need to use your breaks wisely to get them right the second time.
Now even though you can’t revisit sections, you have 2 laminated notes sheets. You can use your notes from prior sections on new sections, so take that for what it’s worth.
Best of luck on your exam! You all got this!
Thanks Bootcamp team!
Tehaum also created an amazing video for how he aced his INBDE. You can watch his video here.
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