Feralis Notes Review: Still Relevant for DAT in 2026?

Short answer: Feralis notes are still a solid, free content refresher for DAT general chemistry and organic chemistry, and nothing about the science itself has changed enough to make them "outdated." But relevance isn't the real question you should be asking. The real question is whether a static note set — written once, for a generic student — can tell you what's actually high-yield for you, right now. It can't. That's the gap we're going to walk through.

We scored in the top 3% on the DAT (97th-plus percentile) before landing at the #1 dental school in the world. So let's actually check the notes against how the current DAT is built, instead of repeating whatever the last Reddit thread said.

What Are Feralis Notes, Exactly?

Feralis notes are a free, widely circulated set of written study notes covering the DAT's science content — most famous for their organic chemistry reaction summaries and general chemistry breakdowns. They've floated around DAT forums for years because they condense a semester or two of textbook material into something you can actually review before an exam.

They're not a company or a paid product — no support, no update schedule, no built-in way to test whether the content is landing. They're notes. That's exactly where the limitation starts.

Feralis Notes Review: What Reddit Actually Says

If you search "Feralis notes review reddit," you'll find a pretty consistent pattern across years of threads on r/DAT and similar communities:

• Students generally praise the organic chemistry section as clear and well-organized for mechanisms.
• The general chemistry notes get similar praise for condensing reactions and stoichiometry cleanly.
• Almost nobody says "these alone got me my score." The recurring advice is to pair them with a real question bank and full-length practice tests.
• Newer threads increasingly ask some version of "are these still good" or "is there something more current," which is really a proxy for a different worry: am I studying the right things at all.

That last pattern is the one worth paying attention to. Freshness anxiety about a note set is usually a sign the student doesn't have a way to measure their own progress — so they're grasping for reassurance from a resource instead.

Are Feralis Notes Still Relevant in 2026?

Here's how we actually checked this, instead of guessing. We laid the notes' content areas against the DAT's current structure and weighting, section by section.

The honest math: Feralis notes speak directly to roughly one-fifth of the exam, and only to the content-recall part of even that section. The DAT's core science topics — cell biology, organic mechanisms, gas laws, thermodynamics — genuinely haven't shifted in any way that makes a well-written note set wrong. What changed since March 2025 is the reporting scale (200-600 instead of the old 1-30), not the subject matter.

So in the narrowest sense — "is the chemistry still correct" — yes. In the sense that actually matters for your score — "do these notes tell me what to spend my limited hours on" — no, and they never could.

The Real Problem With Static Notes (Even Good Ones)

A note set is written once, for an average student, and then frozen. It has no idea you already know renal physiology cold but keep blowing acid-base questions, or that you're strong on SN1/SN2 but weak on spectroscopy. It treats every topic as equally worth your time, because it was written before it ever met you.

That's the trap with any static resource, not just Feralis notes — the same limitation applies to any fixed PDF, deck, or outline. It tells you what to memorize in general. It cannot tell you what's high-yield for you, this week, based on what you're actually missing.

The only way to know that is to test yourself under real conditions and look at the pattern of your misses. That's a fundamentally different kind of information than a note set can ever produce, no matter how current it is.

What Actually Tells You What's High-Yield Right Now

Obvious disclosure: we built DATPractice, so read the rest of this knowing where we stand. Here's our honest reasoning anyway, because it applies whether or not you ever use our product.

Adaptive, full-length practice testing solves the exact problem static notes can't touch, for three reasons:

1. It's built from your real misses, not a generic list. A question bank with 11,000+ questions and hand-written solutions for every answer choice shows you why a distractor was wrong, not just that it was wrong — which is how you actually close a gap instead of re-memorizing the same fact.
2. It covers the sections notes can't. Perceptual ability, reading comprehension, and quantitative reasoning are almost half your exam and entirely skill-based. You can't outline your way to faster cube counting or cleaner word-problem setups — you have to practice them at real timing.
3. It updates as you improve. Custom practice tests generated from your own miss history keep re-testing exactly the topics you haven't locked in yet, so "high-yield for you" keeps recalculating instead of staying frozen like a printed note set.

None of that makes notes useless. It just means notes are a starting point for content, not a strategy for the exam.

How to Use Feralis Notes the Right Way (If You Use Them)

If you already have a copy sitting in your folder, don't throw it out. Just use it correctly:

• Skim the OC and GC sections once, early in your prep, as a fast refresher — not as your primary study plan.
• Never treat "I read the notes" as equivalent to "I know this topic." Test yourself on it under timed conditions before you believe you've learned it.
• Pair them with active recall — a solid Anki deck built for the DAT will do more for retention than re-reading static text ever will.
• Use your full-length practice test results, not the notes' table of contents, to decide what to review next.
• If you're evaluating any paid resource alongside free notes, know what to look for — our guide on spotting a legit DAT prep course covers the red flags worth checking before you pay for anything.

The notes can still earn their spot in your prep. They just can't be the thing that decides your study plan for you.

The Bottom Line

Feralis notes aren't outdated — the DAT's core science content hasn't moved enough to break them. But "still accurate" and "still telling you what to study" are two different questions, and only the second one determines your score. Static notes answer the first. Full-length adaptive testing is the only thing that can honestly answer the second, because it's the only method built from your actual performance instead of a generic outline.