Princeton Review DAT Course: Is It Actually Good?

Short answer: Princeton Review DAT prep is a competent, well-produced course from a large, established test-prep company, but it's built on infrastructure shared across many exams — not around the DAT's specific quirks. It can work fine for structure and content review. It's a weaker choice than a DAT-specific option for the two things the DAT actually punishes weak prep on: Perceptual Ability Test volume and the sheer number of DAT-style practice questions you need to see.

We're the founders of DATPractice, and we both scored in the 97th-plus percentile on the DAT — one of us with a legacy-scale 25 AA and a 30 in organic chemistry, the other with a 27 AA and a 29 Total Science. Obvious disclosure: we built a DAT-specific prep product, so read this knowing where we stand. Here's our honest reasoning anyway, because the underlying question — is a generalist brand good enough for a highly specific exam — matters regardless of which company you choose.

Is Princeton Review DAT Prep Good? The Short Answer

Princeton Review is a decades-old, widely recognized name in test prep, and that reputation is earned across a lot of exams. For the DAT specifically, "good" depends on what you're grading it against: it beats doing nothing, it's roughly comparable to other generalist brands, and it's weaker than a platform built only for the DAT, specifically on PAT training and question-bank depth. That last comparison is the one that actually matters, because it's the one that shows up on your score report.

Princeton Review DAT Course Review: What It Offers

Princeton Review covers a long list of standardized exams — the SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, and the DAT among them — and that breadth comes with real strengths: professional production quality, a familiar brand many pre-dental students already know from a sibling's SAT prep or their own MCAT research, and a structured curriculum with content review built in.

The tradeoff of covering a dozen exams from one shared operation is that course infrastructure tends to get reused: similar lesson formats, similar practice-software shells, similar pacing philosophy, adjusted per exam rather than built from scratch. That works reasonably well where exams overlap — the MCAT and DAT both test biology and organic chemistry — and less well for the parts of the DAT with no equivalent anywhere else in test prep. The DAT has more of those than most people realize going in.

For exact course structure, format, and current pricing, go straight to Princeton Review's own DAT page. Those details change, and we're not going to guess at specifics here.

Where Princeton Review DAT Prep Falls Short

This is the core of any honest review: a course adapted from a shared multi-exam model has to retrofit the DAT's unique parts rather than build around them from day one.

• The Perceptual Ability Test. Six subsections — keyholes/apertures, top-front-end, angle ranking, hole punching, cube counting, pattern folding — that exist on no other exam Princeton Review covers. A course built for the MCAT, SAT, or LSAT has no shared infrastructure to lean on for PAT, so it has to treat it as a bolt-on rather than a core competency, and PAT skill is built almost entirely through repetition.
• Question-bank volume and specificity. A company splitting content-development resources across a dozen exams spreads that effort thin. A DAT-only platform puts every hour of development into one 5-hour, four-section exam, which tends to mean more DAT-style reps per dollar and questions written to mirror how the DAT actually phrases things.
• Timing that matches Prometric exactly. The real DAT runs 100 science questions in 90 minutes, 90 PAT questions in 60 minutes, 50 reading questions in 60 minutes, and 40 quantitative reasoning questions in 45 minutes, with an optional break in the middle. Practice tests only build the right pacing instincts if they mirror that structure precisely.
• No-penalty scoring strategy. The DAT has no penalty for wrong answers, which changes optimal pacing and guessing strategy in ways that don't automatically transfer from penalty-based exams in a shared curriculum model.

None of this means Princeton Review's DAT course is bad — it means a generalist brand's version of the DAT is structurally different from one built with only the DAT in mind.

Princeton Review DAT Prep: Who It's Actually Good For

Being honest matters more than winning the argument. It can make sense if you're already prepping for the MCAT with the same company and want to bundle DAT review into a familiar platform, if you strongly prefer live instructor-led classes over self-paced tools, or if brand familiarity itself reduces your stress. Where it tends to fall short is for students whose weak point is PAT, or who need high question volume in the final stretch — a pattern you'll see echoed in forum threads asking whether Princeton Review DAT prep is good compared to DAT-specific alternatives, precisely because the tradeoff is real.

What to Check Before You Buy Any DAT Course

Whether you're looking at Princeton Review or anything else, run this checklist first — it applies to every course, including ours.

• How many full PAT practice sets, across all six subsections? Ask for a number, not a vague description.
• How many total practice questions, with explanations for every answer choice, not just the correct one?
• Do full-length practice tests match real DAT timing exactly? 100 science in 90 minutes, 90 PAT in 60, 50 reading in 60, 40 QR in 45.
• What's the current price, and what's actually included? Check the company's own site — older posts may be outdated.

For more, see our guide on spotting a legit DAT prep course. If you're weighing another established name, our look at whether Chad's Prep videos are worth it covers a similar generalist-versus-specialist tradeoff.

The Bottom Line on Princeton Review's DAT Course

Princeton Review's DAT course inherits real advantages from a large, established company: production quality, structure, and a name a lot of pre-dental students already trust. But the DAT rewards specialist prep more than most standardized tests because of the PAT, the no-penalty format, and a tight structure with no direct equivalent elsewhere. So when someone asks us "is Princeton Review DAT prep good," our honest, bias-disclosed answer is: good enough as a general content review, but plan to supplement it with DAT-specific PAT training and question volume if you want your practice scores to predict your real one.