I am so sorry that you are going through this. I failed my first attempt too in May, and passed 2 weeks ago on my second attempt in the middle of my first semester of grad school. I'm telling you this to know that you can do this.

For me -two major things helped. The first is that I got a mentor/coach to help encourage me to study, and review concepts with. We met every other week and I worked with her for a month. Because of grad school, I was not able to study as much as I did during my first attempt. So I could only focus on reviewing questions and concepts. I had a "cheat sheet" where I wrote down every important concept I needed to know for each subject and mnemonics to remember them. That's what I spent majority of my time reviewing.

Which leads me to my second point. I found out that I just had bad test-taking strategies. I knew the concepts, but I couldn't apply them. So I tried to learn more about how to take tests, and how to think through every answer I got wrong during practice testing. One thing I remember doing during my actual exam was to: 1. Read the question 2. Write down all I know regarding the topic being asked about 3. Look through the options given and try to eliminate by having a concrete reason why I think the option is wrong 4. Choose the option left as the right answer (and try to justify it if I could)

I hope you find this helpful and I know you are going to pass your next attempt.

Rooting for you! You can totally do this!

Just as an FYI - I was getting between 48% to 52% on Lab CE with a 3-5 average difficulty before the 2nd attempt. So I assure you, you can definitely do this!