Are Chad's Videos Worth It for DAT Biology?

Short answer: Chad's videos are worth it for a handful of DAT Biology topics, but not for most of the section. The format shines when a topic is really a process you need to reason through — genetics crosses, the Calvin cycle, translation. For the other 70-80% of bio, which is wide, disconnected fact recall, reading a tight outline and then drilling practice questions covers more material per hour than watching a lecture.

We scored in the top 3% on the DAT (legacy-scale 25 AA with a 30 in organic chemistry, and 27 AA with a 29 TS) and are now at the #1 dental school in the world. We used Chad's Prep for chemistry ourselves and get asked constantly whether it's worth extending that same approach to Biology. Here's the honest answer.

Why Chad's videos work so well for chemistry — and why that logic doesn't carry over to bio

Chad's Prep built its reputation on general chemistry and organic chemistry, and for good reason. Those subjects are built around a small number of mechanisms, formulas, and reaction types you apply over and over to different problems. A slow, worked-example video is the ideal format for that: watch someone reason through a titration or a substitution mechanism, and you walk away able to do the next twelve problems yourself.

DAT Biology doesn't work that way. It's 40 questions pulled from an official topic list spanning cell biology, genetics, diversity of life, animal structure and function, ecology, and evolution — a dozen-plus unrelated subject areas. There's no single mechanism to master that unlocks the whole thing. The bottleneck isn't "can I reason through this," it's "did I ever read the fact this question is testing." A video format optimized for depth on a narrow mechanism is a poor tool for a section that rewards breadth across dozens of disconnected topics.

What DAT Biology actually tests, and why that matters for video vs. reading

Biology is 40 of the 100 questions in the Survey of Natural Sciences, graded almost entirely on recall of facts you either know or don't. There's very little "figure it out" the way organic chemistry rewards mechanism logic or QR rewards working through a word problem.

Your job for most of bio is coverage: touch every topic on the official outline, retain the facts long enough to recognize them on test day, and drill enough practice questions to find gaps you didn't know you had. Watching a 20-minute video on the digestive system gives you roughly the same facts as a well-organized page of notes — except the notes take four minutes to read and you can re-read and quiz yourself immediately. Video adds real value when comprehension, not memorization, is the obstacle. That's a small slice of bio, but it exists.

Where Chad's videos genuinely earn their watch time in DAT Biology

• Genetics crosses and probability. Dihybrid crosses, linked genes, pedigree analysis — process-based, similar in spirit to a chemistry calculation. Watching someone set up the cross once can save you from building a wrong mental model. We go deeper on drilling this specific skill in our DAT bio genetics practice problems guide.
• Cellular respiration and photosynthesis pathways. The Calvin cycle, electron transport chain, and glycolysis are sequences of steps with inputs and outputs at each stage. A visual walkthrough can click faster than a static diagram for some students.
• Molecular biology processes. Transcription, translation, and DNA replication involve multiple moving parts that benefit from seeing the process in motion once before you memorize the details.
• Embryology's sequence of events. The order of developmental stages is easy to jumble from text alone; watching it laid out can anchor the sequence. Our DAT bio embryology guide covers exactly what depth you need.

Notice the pattern: every item is a process with steps, not a flat list of facts. That's the signal for when video is worth your time — not "is this topic hard," but "is this a sequence I need to see in motion."

Where reading plus practice questions is simply faster

The rest of the syllabus is closer to a vocabulary list than a mechanism, and that's where video stops paying for itself.

• Taxonomy and classification. Domains, kingdoms, phyla characteristics — pure memorization with no process to walk through.
• Animal phyla and comparative anatomy. Long lists of distinguishing features. A table you build yourself beats a narrated list, because you control the pace of review.
• Endocrine glands and hormones. Gland, hormone, target organ, effect — a matching exercise, not a concept to understand.
• Ecology terms and cycles. Succession types, symbiosis categories, nutrient cycle vocabulary. Read it, flashcard it, quiz it.
• Evolution and population genetics vocabulary. Hardy-Weinberg has some calculation to it, but most of this topic is definitions (genetic drift, founder effect, bottleneck) that reading covers just as well as watching.

For all of these, a condensed written outline lets you scan and self-test in a fraction of the time a video takes, because reading speed beats narration speed.

The real time cost: video vs. reading, hour for hour

Here's the math that matters. A biology outline covering the official DAT topic list runs maybe 60-100 pages depending on the source. Reading it closely, once, takes a fraction of the time it would take to watch a comparable video library covering the same breadth, because you read faster than someone talks and you skip what you already know.

That difference compounds across a dozen-plus subject areas. This is the trap with any video-heavy resource applied to a breadth-heavy section: watching feels like studying, but it doesn't test you. Only practice questions do that.

How we'd actually use Chad's videos for DAT Biology

Obvious disclosure: we built DATPractice, so read this knowing where we stand. Here's our honest reasoning anyway.

If you're using Chad's Prep and it includes biology content, spend your limited video time on the process-based topics above — genetics, pathways, molecular biology, embryology sequence — and nowhere else. For everything else, read a condensed outline once, put the high-yield facts into spaced-repetition flashcards, and spend the bulk of your remaining hours answering DAT-style practice questions so you find out which facts didn't stick. That loop mimics what test day actually demands: recognizing a fact fast, under time pressure, out of context.

That's the philosophy behind DATPractice: an 11,000+ question bank with hand-written solutions for every answer choice, and an AI tutor that flags the exact concept behind each miss and re-teaches it to test-depth — no more, no less.

If you're deciding between video, a textbook, and a question bank, they solve different problems: video for the process topics above, a deep textbook like Campbell Biology when you need more depth than the DAT typically rewards (we cover that trade-off in our Campbell Biology for DAT prep breakdown), and a DAT-style question bank to find out where your studying actually has holes, regardless of how you first learned the material.

The honest verdict: Chad's videos aren't wasted for biology, but they're not where the section's time should mostly go. Use them surgically on the process-based topics, then put the rest of your hours into reading, flashcards, and practice questions — that's simply the faster path through a section built on breadth, not depth.