Dear Karthik, Hope you are doing well.

I have already got calls from multiple IIMs. That's why I think I am an appropriate guy to answer your queries. Many of your competitors have already started there preparation for CAT 2019 but you need not to be worry about it.You have enough time to start working from the basics and gradually increase the level of difficulty.What is more important for the CAT like exam is perseverance and regularity with sincerity.Yes hard work matters but smart work is more important than hard work as far as CAT is concerned.

Okay! So first I would like to list some important books and related materials for CAT.

VA-RC:

1. For Vocabulary: Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis
2. For enhancing the reading speed, any novel and newspaper and anything you can read will be good enough.
3. For Grammar: Normal Grammar Rules from Wren and Martin. (Not useful for CAT point of view but for other exams such as XAT/IIFT/SNAP/CET it is useful.)

LR-DI:

Books by Arun Sharma (TMH) and by Nishant Sinha (Pearson)

Quant:

1. Quantum CAT by Sarvesh K Verma
2. Quantitative Aptitude by Arun Sharma

These books will complete your preperation by 50%. But other 50% will be completed by Mocks. You have to join online Mock Test Series to sail through CAT Exam.

Now coming to main part i.e how one should approach in test series?

For any of the exam test series always play a crucial role and they provide us a rough idea of our stand ,how is our preparation going on and all that. Don’t skip this part of your preparation. So I was CAT 2018 aspirant I can understand the demotivation these test series exert.But you need not to be worry about percentile and marks you would get rather try to work on your weak areas.

Proper analysis of test series is very important. So make a chart as per topics like In quants try to categorize in rows arithmetic,numbers,algebra,geometry etc. and in columns no of questions attempted,got wrong,leave in such a manner.See everybody has his/her own way of analysis so you could frame it accordingly.

Good Luck for your preperation. You can comment over here for any further queries.