Free Prep Resources the Firms Publish, and Their Limits

What the publishers publish free for case interview prep

Every row is published by the organization named, at no cost, with no purchase.

McKinsey's interviewing page says its cases contain logic, thought processes and suggested answers, and recommends reviewing them. Bain's FashionCo case goes one better on marking, labeling a good answer as one including different types of ways to increase revenue and a better answer as one adding the pros, cons and practicality of each idea.

That is six cases in total. It is a small number, and saying so is more useful than padding the list.

Two rows in the table carry a condition worth reading before you click. BCG's modules sit on a platform the firm does not own, so the account and the data belong to that platform. And the university row is free without being open, which the section below deals with at length because it is the single most common distortion in lists like this one.

What the free prep resources cover, dimension by dimension

Coverage is uneven and knowing where the holes are decides what you do next. The six dimensions and their weights come from our own code, set out on our method page.

The market sizing row is the largest hole. None of the firm pages we read publishes an estimation case. It is also a dimension with its own rubric in our code, weighted Assumption chain 30, Scope 25, Arithmetic 25 and Sanity check 20.

The synthesis row is the second. Nothing published gives you a model thirty-second recommendation with a grade attached, which means the free corpus trains the middle of a case better than its end.

Working the free material properly

Six cases used well outperform forty used badly. This order is ours. Scoring one of those answers costs nothing here either, since thirteen tool addresses open with no account, six of them graded drills.

1. Start with the quantitative one you can fully check. McKinsey's Electro-Light case publishes every input: a 16-ounce bottle described as one eighth of a gallon at $2 to retailers, $40 million of fixed costs, and $1.90 per bottle to produce and deliver. Contribution is $0.10, so break-even is 40,000,000 divided by 0.10, which is 400 million bottles, or 50 million gallons at 8 bottles per gallon. Do it on paper, because the page itself reminds you calculators are not allowed.
2. Then the qualitative one with two grades. Answer Bain's brainstorming question, then read both the good and the better answer and mark the difference.
3. Then the remaining four, one per week. Reworking a case you have seen is worth more than meeting a new one, because the second attempt is where delivery improves.
4. Use the vendor practice test only if you have been sent that assessment. Sova's preparation hub says the activities in a real assessment are selected by the employer, so it teaches the interface rather than the content.
5. Use the simulations for familiarity rather than for a score. BCG's virtual experience page says the modules help you stand out on an application and attaches no figure to that claim.

The university services problem

Harvard's career services guide publishes something more valuable than any document: a person who will read your resume. It lists resume workshops, weekday drop-in advice between 2pm and 4pm, a recorded webinar, and industry-specific review clinics on its events calendar.

All of it is free. None of it is open. Those services exist for students at that institution, and a free resource list that includes them without saying so is misleading whoever is not enrolled there.

Two consequences follow. If you are at a university, this is the highest-value free item in the inventory. It is also the one candidates neglect. A human reading your resume beats any template, and the drop-in hours are two hours a day, five days a week.

If you are not enrolled anywhere, the equivalent does not exist at zero cost. Pretending it does wastes an afternoon on a form you cannot submit. What does transfer is the written guidance, which is public: the do and avoid lists, the action verb categories, the letter rules. Our resume action words page works through the verb list and counts it.

One more note on eligibility. Some offices extend services to recent alumni for a period after graduation. That is a per-institution rule and none of the pages we read states a general one, so check your own office rather than assuming either way.

The same eligibility question reaches paid products, and one seller says so on its own page. Our Management Consulted review records its statement that students at more than 130 partner schools may hold complimentary access to a curriculum otherwise priced at $700 a year. That is one email to a career services office before any payment.

The boundary we hold, and why

Free lists are exactly where a link to somebody else's copyrighted material appears. This site has received two DMCA notices, so the policy is written down rather than improvised.

1. No PDFs hosted here. Nothing is republished, mirrored or re-uploaded.
2. No case text reproduced. The published cases above are linked and described, and their figures are cited in the course of working them.
3. No links to unauthorized copies. A school casebook circulating on a file host is not a free resource, whatever the file name says.
4. School casebooks described rather than distributed. Our own casebook pages explain what each collection is and how to obtain it legitimately, and this page links to them rather than to files.

The point is practical as well as legal. A case reconstructed from someone's memory has figures that do not reconcile, and a case whose arithmetic does not close teaches the wrong lesson: you spend the session hunting for a path that never existed.

Is the free case interview prep enough

For structuring and for familiarity, most of the way. For volume, no, and nobody publishes a number that would tell you how much volume is enough.

Two gaps are structural rather than a matter of effort. Six cases will not fill eight weeks. And nothing in the official material above grades your synthesis, because no firm publishes a mark scheme in any form. Our own free tools do grade it, against weights we publish, which is a different kind of source.

A third gap is worth naming because it is invisible. Nothing free tells you which stage you are facing, and the stages differ enough that the wrong preparation is a real risk. McKinsey states there is no need to prepare for Solve. Bain allows a calculator on its assessment and forbids one in the interviews after it. The email you received after applying is the document that decides, which is the argument for keeping it somewhere you can find, as our application tracker does.

That is where we sell something, and here is the boundary. Our drills score one dimension each using the weights above, our case library supplies volume, and neither teaches business content, because none of the dimensions is a knowledge test. If you can finish six official cases, build the artifacts, and score them honestly against a rubric, you do not need us. The case interview drills page has the rubrics and a worked example, and how to practice cases has the session structure to use them in.