avpiper, it may be blunter than what you wanted to hear but Flight Master is giving you advice. By all means apply, but if you’re having to practice to get by the initial testing you may well struggle further down the line. Once training starts it isn’t a case of 18 months of practice, practice, practice and then you just have to be fine at the end of it. It’s more a case of 18 months of do, do, do, being assessed continuously to meet various standards as time goes on. There’s no real effective equivalent of a “practice pitch” where you can sink extra hours into it in your own time either.
There are plenty of valid controllers who didn’t get in at the first time of asking (albeit, the testing has probably gone through various guises since then so it won’t necessarily be identical) but it can and does happen. Give it a go, but go into it with your eyes open. It’s probably not going to get any easier than those tests for quite a while. Good luck.