Of the OAT's four sections, Physics is the one that most often catches pre-optometry students off guard -- not because the material is unusually difficult, but because of how far removed it can feel from the rest of a typical pre-optometry academic track.
Why it's surprising
Many pre-optometry students complete their required physics coursework early in their undergraduate years -- often a full year before they start serious OAT preparation -- and don't revisit the material again until they're studying for the exam itself. Unlike Biology, General Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry, which many students continue reviewing or building on through later coursework, physics knowledge can go stale simply from lack of continued use, even for students who did well in the course originally.
Related: What to Expect on the OAT: Format, Scoring, and How to Prepare
What OAT Physics actually covers
It's algebra-based, non-calculus physics -- no calculus is required or tested, even though the topic list will look familiar from a typical introductory physics course. The section spans 13 official topic areas: kinematics, dynamics, energy and momentum, circuits, electrostatics, fluids, optics, rotational motion, simple harmonic motion, statics, thermodynamics, units, and waves. That's a wide breadth of subtopics packed into 40 questions, which means broad, working familiarity with each area's core formulas matters more than deep expertise in any single one.
The real challenge: fast formula recall, not conceptual difficulty
For most students who've already taken introductory physics, the actual challenge on this section isn't learning new concepts -- it's quickly recalling the right formula under time pressure, at about 75 seconds per question. Fumbling to remember Ohm's law, or the formula for kinetic energy, or how resistors combine in a parallel circuit, costs real time that a well-drilled formula reference would have saved.
How to approach preparing for it
Build a compact reference covering the single core formula from each of the 13 topic areas, and drill it until recall is automatic -- this is a more efficient use of limited study time than deep re-derivation of concepts you already understood once. Pay close attention to units throughout practice problems, since unit-conversion mistakes are one of the most common, avoidable sources of wrong answers on a physics section. And because 13 topic areas is a lot to keep simultaneously sharp, rotate your review across all of them regularly rather than mastering one topic completely before moving to the next -- spaced, varied review tends to hold up better under real exam conditions than concentrated, single-topic study sessions.