Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 7, 2026

 

The Fuqua Casebook is a free case interview practice book published each year by the Duke MBA Consulting Club, and the 2025-2026 edition includes 9 brand new cases, a Fuqua Classics section, industry primers, and a Case Types 101 walkthrough. This guide covers what sits in every section, which cases to practice first, and how to turn the book into actual improvement instead of passive reading.

 

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Key Takeaways

 

The Fuqua Casebook is one of the strongest free MBA casebooks in circulation, and it pays off most once you already know how to structure a case and can drive one without prompting.

You can download the casebook here: Fuqua 2024.pdf

 

• Written and edited every year by second year students in the Duke MBA Consulting Club

 

• The 2025-2026 edition carries 9 brand new cases plus a Fuqua Classics section of reused favorites

 

• Every case is tagged by industry, case type, firm style, quantitative difficulty, and qualitative difficulty

 

• Industry primers and a Case Types 101 section sit at the front, before any case begins

 

• Duke students get current editions through the club, and everyone else works from older copies posted online

 

What Is the Fuqua Casebook?

 

The Fuqua Casebook is a free case interview preparation book produced each year by the Duke MBA Consulting Club at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Each edition contains new practice cases written by second year MBA students, a set of reused classic cases, industry primers, and a breakdown of common case types with sample structures.

 

The club, known on campus as the DMCC, is one of the largest student run professional organizations at Fuqua. Its stated mission is to promote consulting careers among Duke MBA students and prepare members for work at premier global firms, and the casebook is the most visible output of that effort. You can see the club's full remit on the DMCC site.

 

The book exists because consulting is still where most Fuqua MBAs end up. Duke's 2025 Daytime MBA employment report shows consulting taking 34% of full time hires, ahead of finance at 20.9% and technology at 15.6%, with consulting grads reporting a median base salary of $190,000. Those figures come straight from Fuqua's own employment reports.

 

What makes the book useful outside Durham is that the editors write for a wider audience on purpose. Every recent edition ends its welcome message by inviting students at other MBA programs to use it. That is why the Fuqua Casebook shows up in prep plans at schools that have nothing to do with Duke.

 

What Is Inside the Fuqua Casebook?

 

The Fuqua Casebook has four content sections: a Case Types 101 primer, a set of industry primers, the new cases for that year, and a Fuqua Classics section of cases pulled forward from past editions. In the 2025-2026 edition, Case Types 101 starts on page 7, industry primers on page 17, the new cases on page 30, and Fuqua Classics on page 124.

 

Case Types 101 is the part most candidates skip and should not. It defines each case type and gives a starting structure for it, which is a faster on ramp than trying to reverse engineer case interview frameworks from the answer keys.

 

The 2024-2025 edition listed nine case types in that section:

 

• Profitability: diagnosing a drop in profits or finding ways to raise them

 

• Growth strategy: choosing the best way for a company to grow

 

• Market entry: assessing whether a firm should expand into a new business

 

• Market sizing: estimating the size of a market, usually as revenue potential

 

• Opportunity assessment: weighing the purchase or sale of a business, or building versus abandoning infrastructure

 

• Merger or acquisition: evaluating whether a firm should buy or combine with another company

 

• Product launch: assessing a new product offering

 

• Pricing: deciding what to charge for a product or service

 

• Private equity: deciding whether to invest in a target company for financial return

 

The industry primers are the second underrated section. Each one lays out revenue drivers, fixed and variable costs, key trends, and risks for an industry, which is exactly the business context that separates a candidate who sounds like a consultant from one who sounds like a student. The 2025-2026 telecom primer, for instance, lists network usage, customer service, retail operations, device procurement, and field technician labor as variable costs, and flags heavy capital expenditure and spectrum regulation as risks.

 

Then come the cases themselves. Each one opens with a prompt, followed by interviewer guidance, clarifying information to release only if asked, exhibits, a quantitative section with worked math, and a recommendation. That interviewer guidance is what makes the book work in pairs rather than solo.

 

What Cases Are in the Latest Fuqua Casebook?

 

The 2025-2026 edition, edited by Ashish Arora of the Fuqua Class of 2026, contains 9 brand new cases spread across case type, industry, firm style, and difficulty. Here are the first six in the order they appear in the book.

 

Case	Industry	Case type	Firm style	Quant	Qual
MedTech Co.	Healthcare	Profitability	BCG	Easy	Medium
The Grass is Greener	Agriculture	Growth strategy	Bain	Medium	Medium
BioPharma LOE	Bio-Pharma	Cost reduction	BCG	Difficult	Difficult
Breaking out of Boston	Real estate	Market entry	McKinsey	Easy	Medium
Big Fat Greek Problem	Hospitality	Growth strategy	Bain	Difficult	Difficult
Fasten your Seatbelts	Travel	Operations	BCG	Difficult	Medium

 

Tiny Ripples Coffee Co. follows those six, with two more cases closing out the new section.

 

Two things stand out in the lineup. The book front loads the easier cases, so working straight through gives you a difficulty ramp rather than a random walk. It also tags firm style, which lets you rehearse an interviewer led McKinsey style case and a candidate led one in the same week.

 

The prior edition is worth knowing too. The 2024-2025 book ran 171 pages and paired 8 new cases with 8 Fuqua Classics, including Fuquan Land from 2021-2022 and Sardine Airlines from 2016-2017, so a single edition often gives you cases spanning a decade of Duke recruiting.

 

How Has the Fuqua Casebook Changed Across Editions?

 

The Fuqua Casebook has gotten shorter on new cases and deeper on supporting material. Editions from the late 2010s regularly shipped 14 to 20 fresh cases, while recent editions carry 8 to 12 and spend the extra pages on primers, case type structures, and reused classics.

 

Edition	New cases	What was notable
2019-2020	14	Industry one pagers included for each sector covered
2020-2021	13	Added tips for virtual interviews during remote recruiting
2021-2022	17	Cases flagged by firm style, such as Bain style or BCG style
2022-2023	12	164 pages, plus guidance on keeping a case log
2023-2024	12	176 pages and a full format overhaul built to simulate a live case
2024-2025	8	171 pages, with a separate Fuqua Classics section of 8 reused cases
2025-2026	9	Updated industry primers and sample frameworks for each case type

 

The practical takeaway is that you should not treat the newest edition as a replacement for the old ones. Two or three recent editions stacked together give you 30 or more distinct cases, which is roughly what a serious prep block needs.

 

Where Can You Get the Fuqua Casebook?

 

You can download the casebook here: Fuqua 2024.pdf

Duke MBA students get the current Fuqua Casebook through the Duke MBA Consulting Club, which distributes it to members alongside its case training programming. The club's document library sits on FuquaConnect and requires a Duke login.

 

Everyone else is working from copies that students have uploaded to document sharing sites. There is no official public download page, and no edition is sold anywhere, so treat any site charging for it as a red flag.

 

The cleanest route if you are not at Duke is a swap. Consulting club members at most MBA programs trade casebooks with each other, and asking a Fuqua contact directly works more often than people expect. Failing that, the older editions floating around online are still perfectly usable, since case interview fundamentals have not changed much.

 

Is the Fuqua Casebook Good for Case Interview Prep?

 

Yes, and it ranks near the top of the free MBA consulting casebooks available. The case writing is clean, the interviewer guidance is genuinely usable by a partner with no consulting background, and the difficulty tagging tells you what you are signing up for before you start.

 

Having coached hundreds of candidates one on one, the pattern I see is that school casebooks are excellent at volume and mediocre at teaching. They give you reps. They do not tell you what a good structure looks like or why yours fell apart.

 

Here is where the book is strong and where it falls short.

 

Dimension	Strength	Limitation
Case quality	Written by second years who just went through recruiting	Quality varies case to case since authors change every year
Difficulty labels	Separate quantitative and qualitative ratings per case	Ratings are student judgments, not calibrated to any firm
Teaching content	Case Types 101 and industry primers give real context	No instruction on delivery, communication, or recovery
Feedback	Answer keys show the expected structure and math	No one grades how you actually performed
Realism	Firm style tags let you rehearse different formats	Hard cases often exceed what fits in a 30 minute interview

 

Use it for what it is good at. Learn structure and delivery somewhere that teaches, then come to the casebook for volume.

 

How Should You Use the Fuqua Casebook?

 

Use the Fuqua Casebook as a live practice partner exercise, not as reading material. Read the front sections once, then work the cases out loud with a partner who holds the book and plays interviewer, one case per session, with feedback immediately afterward.

 

1. Read the front matter first: work through Case Types 101 and the industry primers before touching a single case, so you are not learning case types and solving cases at the same time
   
   
2. Pick cases by difficulty, not by industry: start with the easy and easy pairings, then move to medium, then to the difficult and difficult combinations
   
   
3. Give your partner the book cold: the interviewer guidance is written so someone with no consulting experience can run the case, so they do not need to prep
   
   
4. Time yourself honestly: hold to 30 to 40 minutes including the recommendation, since real interviews will not wait while you finish a calculation
   
   
5. Debrief for 10 minutes after every case: compare your structure to the answer key, then have your partner grade your communication, not just your math
   
   
6. Keep a case log: the 2022-2023 edition recommends tracking case name, source, interviewer, date, industry, case type, feedback, and takeaways in a shared spreadsheet

 

That case log recommendation is the single most valuable page in the book and almost nobody uses it. Patterns only become visible when you can look back at 15 cases at once and see that you fumbled the same kind of exhibit interpretation six separate times.

 

If you do not have a reliable partner, the book still works, but you need a different method. There are ways to practice case interviews by yourself that preserve most of the benefit, mainly by covering the answer key and narrating your structure out loud to a recording.

 

Which Fuqua Casebook Cases Should You Start With?

 

Start with a case rated easy on both the quantitative and qualitative scales, then work in order of increasing difficulty. In the 2025-2026 edition, MedTech Co. and Breaking out of Boston are the two gentlest entry points, and BioPharma LOE and Big Fat Greek Problem should be saved for last.

 

The sequencing matters more than people think. A candidate who opens with a difficult and difficult case learns that cases are impossible. A candidate who opens with an easy one learns the rhythm and builds from there.

 

There are three sequences that work well depending on where you are.

 

• If you are new to casing: do every easy case in the book first, regardless of case type, until the flow of a case feels automatic

 

• If you have a specific weakness: filter by case type and run every profitability case back to back so the pattern becomes obvious

 

• If interviews are close: match the firm style tags to the firms you are interviewing with and run those cases under strict time pressure

 

That last approach is the most underused. If your first round is with Bain, running the Bain tagged cases in the book gives you a much closer rehearsal than picking cases at random.

 

What Mistakes Should You Avoid With the Fuqua Casebook?

 

The most common failure is treating the casebook as a textbook. Candidates read cases the way they read a chapter, absorb the answer, feel productive, and then freeze the first time someone asks them a question out loud.

 

Mistake #1: Reading the solution before attempting the case

 

Once you have seen the answer, that case is spent. You cannot forget a structure once you have seen it, and solving a problem you already understand teaches you nothing about handling one you do not.

 

Treat every case as one-time use. There are only about 16 cases in a given edition, so burning them by reading ahead is expensive.

 

Mistake #2: Copying the answer key structure as your framework

 

Casebook answer keys show one reasonable structure, not the only correct one. Interviewers are testing whether you can build a structure fit to the specific problem, and a memorized framework is obvious within about 20 seconds.

 

Build your own structure first, then compare. If yours captured the same drivers through different buckets, you did well.

 

Mistake #3: Skipping the math because you understand the approach

 

Knowing how to set up a calculation and executing it under pressure are different skills. Candidates who skip the arithmetic in practice are the ones who stall on a simple division problem in the real interview.

 

Do every calculation by hand, on paper, out loud. Sharpening case interview math is the highest return use of casebook practice for most MBA candidates.

 

Mistake #4: Ignoring the behavioral questions between cases

 

Older Fuqua editions paired behavioral questions with each case for a reason, and the 2014-2015 edition explicitly built them in after students reported a shortage of structured behavioral practice. Firms reject candidates on fit as often as on cases.

 

Ask your partner to spend five minutes on consulting behavioral questions before each case. It costs almost nothing and doubles what you get from the session.

 

What Should You Practice Alongside the Fuqua Casebook?

 

Pair the Fuqua Casebook with two other things: casebooks from other MBA programs for volume, and structured instruction for technique. One casebook alone gives you roughly 16 cases, and most candidates who land offers complete 30 to 50 full cases before their first round.

 

The Kellogg casebook and books from other top programs cover the same case types with different exhibit styles, which is useful precisely because you should not get comfortable with one house format. Rotate between them rather than finishing one before starting the next.

 

On the technique side, casebooks assume you already know how to open a case, build a structure, and drive to a recommendation. If you want to learn those mechanics quickly, my case interview course covers the full method in as little as 7 days.

 

You should also fit your practice to the calendar. MBA consulting recruiting moves fast, and mapping your case volume against the consulting recruiting timeline keeps you from peaking two weeks after first round invitations go out.

 

One more thing worth paying for if you can. Peer feedback plateaus fast because your partner has the same blind spots you do, which is why interview coaching with a former interviewer surfaces problems a classmate will never catch.

 

The Fuqua Casebook is one of the best free case interview resources in circulation, but it rewards volume and honest self assessment rather than reading. Get a partner, work the cases in difficulty order out loud, and log every session so you can see what is actually holding you back.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Is the Fuqua Casebook free?

 

Yes. The Duke MBA Consulting Club produces the Fuqua Casebook for its members at no cost and does not sell it. Duke MBA students access current editions through the club, while older editions circulate freely on document sharing sites. There is no official public download page, so anyone outside Duke is relying on copies posted by other students.

 

How many cases are in the Fuqua Casebook?

 

It depends on the edition. The 2025-2026 edition includes 9 brand new cases plus a Fuqua Classics section of reused favorites. The 2024-2025 edition paired 8 new cases with 8 classics across 171 pages, and older editions from the late 2010s often carried 14 to 20 new cases each.

 

Do you need to be a Duke student to use the Fuqua Casebook?

 

No. The casebook is written for Duke MBA students, but the editors explicitly welcome students from other MBA programs. The cases are not Duke specific and work for anyone preparing for consulting interviews. The only practical difference is that Duke students get the newest edition first.

 

Is the Fuqua Casebook harder than a real case interview?

 

Some cases are harder and some are easier. Cases tagged difficult on both the quantitative and qualitative scales tend to pack in more math and more exhibits than a typical 30 minute interview allows. The easy and medium cases are a close match for what most firms actually give first round candidates.

 

How many Fuqua Casebook cases should you do?

 

Work through every case in the newest edition, then pull from the Fuqua Classics section and from other school casebooks. Most candidates who land offers complete 30 to 50 full cases total across all sources. Doing 16 cases from one book is a solid start but not enough on its own.

 

Should you read the Fuqua Casebook solutions before practicing?

 

No. Reading the interviewer guidance and the answer key first destroys the value of the case, because you cannot simulate the pressure of solving a problem you have already seen. Save the solution for after you finish. If you must self study, cover the answer and reveal only the exhibit you would have been handed.

 

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