Feralis Notes for DAT Ochem: An Honest Review

Short answer: Feralis notes are a genuinely useful, tightly condensed refresher for DAT organic chemistry — good for re-learning reactions and mechanisms fast — but they're thinner than the famous Feralis biology notes and were never designed to replace timed practice. Use them to rebuild your ochem foundation, then drill that foundation with real questions.

We've read a lot of DAT prep material between the two of us, and we get asked about Feralis notes constantly because the ochem community around them is small but loyal. Here's our straight take, no hedging.

What Feralis notes actually are

Feralis is Dr. Ali Sohraby, who took the DAT, scored well, and wrote up his own study notes so other students didn't have to reinvent them. His biology notes are the ones that made the name famous — they circulated for years as one of the most widely shared free and low-cost DAT resources on forums like Student Doctor Network.

The organic chemistry notes came later, as the Feralis brand expanded and became tied to the DAT Booster platform. They follow the same philosophy as the bio notes: take the DAT-relevant slice of a huge subject and condense it into something you can actually finish reading.

Ownership, bundling, and exactly what's included change over time, so check DAT Booster's own site for the current version, format, and price rather than trusting anything you read secondhand — including this article.

Feralis notes ochem DAT review: what's genuinely good

• They're fast to get through. Condensed notes exist so you're not re-reading a 1,200-page organic chemistry textbook. If you took ochem 1 and 2 in college and just need the rust knocked off, that's exactly what condensed notes are for.
• They focus on DAT-relevant reactions. The DAT doesn't test the full breadth of a two-semester ochem sequence, and notes built specifically for the exam tend to skip the stuff that never shows up on Prometric's screen.
• They're portable and low-friction. A PDF you can scroll on your phone during a commute has real value when you're squeezing studying into a busy pre-dental schedule.
• The price point is approachable. Compared to a full course, condensed notes are usually one of the cheaper line items in a study budget — confirm current pricing directly on the seller's site, since it changes.

Where Feralis ochem notes fall short

• They're the newer, thinner sibling of the bio notes. The organic chemistry material doesn't have the same years-long track record or depth of community feedback that the biology notes built up. Expect a leaner set of pages, not an exhaustive reference.
• Notes can't teach you a mechanism you never understood. Condensed material is a reminder for something you've already learned once, not a substitute for the original class. If a reaction never clicked in ochem 2, a two-line summary usually won't fix that.
• Zero built-in practice. This is the big one. Reading about an E2 elimination and being able to spot one under a 90-second-per-question timer are different skills, and static notes only build the first one.
• No feedback loop. A page of notes doesn't know what you missed yesterday. It reads the same whether you've mastered spectroscopy or still mix up IR and NMR peaks.

Who Feralis ochem notes actually suit

They're a strong fit if you already have a real organic chemistry foundation from college and just need a condensed, DAT-scoped refresher to re-anchor it. They're also a reasonable low-cost supplement if you're using a different resource as your main plan and want a second, more compressed pass on the reactions.

They're a poor fit if organic chemistry never made sense the first time around, or if you're hoping a set of notes alone will carry you to a competitive score. We're direct about this because it's the single most common mistake we see in DAT prep threads: students treat notes as a study plan instead of as one input into a study plan.

Notes vs. practice testing: what each one actually builds

Obvious disclosure, so you can weigh our opinion correctly

We built DATPractice, so read the rest of this with that in mind. Here's our honest reasoning anyway: we've seen enough forum threads and talked to enough students to know that people who lean entirely on static notes for the science section tend to plateau, because the DAT rewards pattern recognition and pacing more than raw recall of facts.

That's not an insult to Feralis notes specifically — it's true of any notes-only strategy, ours included if we only sold notes. It's why we built DATPractice around full-length practice tests and a question bank instead of another set of PDFs.

A study sequence that actually works with Feralis notes

1. Read the ochem notes once, start to finish, to rebuild your baseline of named reactions, mechanisms, and the handful of spectroscopy rules the DAT actually tests. If you want a sense of how much spectroscopy really shows up, see our breakdown of IR and NMR on the DAT.
2. Immediately test yourself on what you just read, topic by topic, instead of moving on to the next chapter of notes. Passive re-reading feels productive and isn't.
3. Log every miss by concept, not just by question number. "I missed an E1cb question" is far more useful to know than "I got question 14 wrong."
4. Go back to the notes only to patch that specific gap, then re-test it a few days later. This is the loop that actually moves your score, and it's the same loop we used to get our own scores into the top percentile.
5. Once mechanisms feel solid, shift most of your remaining time to full, timed science sections so pacing becomes automatic before test day.

If you're not sure whether your ochem is currently harder or easier than it should be relative to your college class, our post on whether DAT chemistry is harder than your college chemistry class is a useful gut-check before you commit to a notes-heavy plan.

The bottom line on Feralis notes for DAT ochem

They're a legitimate, well-regarded resource for condensing DAT organic chemistry, built by someone who actually took and did well on the exam. They are not, and were never marketed to be, a full replacement for practice testing. Treat them as a fast refresher, pair them with real question volume, and you'll get the value they're actually built to provide.