DAT General Chemistry Topics: Full Breakdown & Study Plan

General Chemistry is 30 of the 100 questions in the DAT's Survey of the Natural Sciences, which makes it 30% of your Total Science subscore and roughly a third of your science section time. Those 30 questions are drawn from about ten topic areas defined in the ADA's own test outline, and they are not weighted evenly — some topics show up almost every test, others show up once if at all. Below is the full breakdown, and how we'd build a study plan around it.

How Many Gen Chem Questions Are on the DAT?

Exactly 30. The Survey of the Natural Sciences is 100 questions in 90 minutes, split three ways: 40 Biology, 30 General Chemistry, 30 Organic Chemistry.

The section isn't internally timed by subject, so nothing forces you to spend exactly 27 minutes on gen chem. In practice, most students move through gen chem questions faster than bio or OC because they're more calculation-based and less reading-heavy, which frees up time elsewhere in the block.

• 30 questions out of 100 in the science section
• ~27 minutes of the 90-minute block if you split time proportionally (not a hard rule)
• 30% of your Total Science (TS) subscore, and it also feeds into your Academic Average (AA) as one of five equally-weighted components

DAT Science Section Chemistry Weight: Where Gen Chem Fits

Zoom out and chemistry — General plus Organic — is 60% of the entire science section by question count. Biology is the other 40%. If you're the type of person who thinks in "subjects I'm strong in," that means chemistry carries more raw weight on test day than biology does, even though most pre-dents study bio the longest out of habit from undergrad.

Gen chem also matters twice: once inside your TS subscore, and again inside your AA, which averages Bio, GC, OC, RC, and QR. A weak gen chem score drags down two numbers admissions committees look at, not one.

DAT General Chemistry Topics Breakdown: The Full List

The ADA publishes a topic outline for General Chemistry, and every real DAT draws its 30 questions from these areas. Here's the full list, with how we'd rank each one by how often it actually shows up on test day, based on the pattern across recent exams we and our students have taken.

Notice something: with 11 topic areas splitting 30 questions, most individual topics are worth only 1–4 questions on any given exam. That's exactly why over-studying a low-yield topic like nuclear chemistry at the expense of stoichiometry or equilibrium is one of the most common time-wasting mistakes we see. If you want the exact formulas for each of these topics in one place, we put them all in our DAT General Chemistry Formula & Equation Sheet.

How to Study General Chemistry for the DAT

Here's the approach we used to hit a 30 and a 29 in the sciences, and the one we built into DATPractice for everyone else.

1. Take one full-length practice test cold. Don't study a single gen chem topic first. You need a real baseline that tells you which of the 11 topics above are actually your weak spots, not which ones you assume are weak.
2. Rank your weak topics by test frequency, not by how much you hate them. Stoichiometry and equilibrium mistakes cost you more than nuclear chemistry mistakes will, on average, because they show up more often. Fix the high-frequency gaps first.
3. Learn every concept to test-depth, not textbook-depth. The DAT does not reward derivations or edge-case exceptions your undergrad professor cared about. Learn the rule, the common trap, and the calculation shortcut — then move on.
4. Drill calculations by hand. There's no calculator during the science section, so gen chem math (stoichiometry, gas laws, pH) has to be fast and calculator-free. If you're unsure what's allowed where, we cover it in Are Calculators Allowed on the DAT Gen Chem Section?
5. Re-test every 1–2 weeks with another full-length exam. A concept isn't learned until it holds up under timed, mixed-topic pressure. Isolated review questions don't tell you that; full sections do.
6. Track your miss pattern, not just your score. Two students can both get a 24/30 on gen chem and have completely different gaps. Know which of the 11 topics is actually behind each miss.

A Simple Gen Chem Study Timeline

If you're building this into a broader DAT plan, here's roughly how we'd sequence gen chem inside it:

• Weeks 1–2: Baseline full-length test, then hit stoichiometry, gases, and acids/bases — the three highest-frequency topics.
• Weeks 3–4: Chemical equilibria, structure/bonding, and solutions. Start mixing in full-length practice tests weekly.
• Weeks 5–6: Thermodynamics, kinetics, liquids/solids, electrochemistry, nuclear chemistry — the lower-frequency topics, in that order.
• Final 2 weeks: Full-length tests only. Fix whatever the miss pattern shows, in priority order of test frequency.

Two topics deserve their own deep dive because they're consistently high-yield and consistently misunderstood: stoichiometry, which we cover in Stoichiometry Practice Problems for the DAT, and the equilibrium/acid-base cluster, which we break down in Titration & Equilibrium on the DAT: What to Know.

The Bigger Picture: Don't Over-Study What's Rarely Tested

The single biggest inefficiency we see in gen chem prep is treating all 11 topics as equally important because a textbook chapter gives them equal page count. The real DAT doesn't. Thirty questions spread across eleven topics means most topics are worth a handful of points, and a few — stoichiometry, gases, acids/bases, equilibrium — are worth disproportionately more. We built DATPractice's 40 full-length tests to mirror the real exam's actual topic distribution, question style, and timing, so the practice itself teaches you where to spend your hours. That's the whole philosophy: the DAT is standardized, so your practice score becomes your real score, as long as you're practicing on material that matches the real thing and learning only what the test actually rewards.