Kelley Casebook: Free Download and How to Use It
Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer
Last Updated: September 10, 2026
You can download the Kelley casebook here: Kelley 2018.pdf
This guide covers what Kelley candidates actually use to prepare for consulting case interviews and tips for practicing with a casebook.
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Key Takeaways
You can download the Kelley casebook here: Kelley 2018.pdf
- Kelley undergraduates prepare through the Consulting Workshop, a three-course sequence built around an August trip to 13 firms
- Kelley MBAs prepare through the Consulting Club, which runs casing weeks, speed casing nights, and mock interview workshops
- Consulting pay held firm: median base was $175,000 for the MBA Class of 2025 even as consulting placement fell to 16.2%
Is There a Kelley Casebook?
You can download the Kelley casebook here: Kelley 2018.pdf
What Do Kelley Students Use to Prepare for Case Interviews?
Kelley students prepare through three institutional channels: the undergraduate Consulting Workshop, the MBA Consulting Club, and the first-year Consulting Academy. Each one replaces what a casebook would do, and each one does it better because a human is watching you solve the case.
How does the Kelley Consulting Workshop prepare undergraduates?
The Kelley Consulting Workshop is a selective three-course program that second-year students apply to, with applications generally due by the end of December and decisions communicated by early April. Members take J420 on case analysis and consulting presentations in the fall of junior year, X403 on the consulting industry, and X404 on structured thinking in the fall of senior year.
X403 is built around an August trip to Chicago. During the August 2024 trip, workshop members met with consultants at 13 firms including Bain, BCG, Deloitte, Kearney, L.E.K., McKinsey, and PwC.
X404 is the course that maps most directly onto interview preparation, since it teaches the structured thinking that underlies case interviewing along with networking and client skills. That coursework covers roughly what strong case interview frameworks training delivers, but with graded feedback attached.
What does the Kelley Consulting Club do for MBAs?
The Kelley MBA Consulting Club runs the live practice that a casebook cannot: casing super weeks, speed casing nights, mock interview workshops, group casing events, case competition support, and alumni and internship panels. Members also get casing support even if they are not in the Consulting Academy.
Speed casing night is the format worth stealing if you are preparing on your own. Short cases, rapid rotation, immediate feedback, and no time to overthink your structure.
That volume matters more than the source of the cases. Finding a reliable case interview practice partner is the most valuable move available to a candidate without club access.
What is the Kelley Consulting Academy?
Every Kelley MBA spends 10 months before the summer internship in a mandatory Career Foundation Academy, and consulting is one of six tracks alongside business marketing, consumer marketing, business operations, capital markets, and strategic finance. The Consulting Academy includes sessions with practicing consultants, company visits, and a case competition judged by consultants from a Big Four firm.
More than 300 companies recruit at Kelley across all programs. The Academy structure is why Kelley MBAs tend to arrive at first-round interviews with a clearer sense of firm differences than candidates who prepared alone.
Which Free Casebooks Should Kelley Candidates Practice With?
Practice with the Kellogg casebook first, then add Booth for quantitative depth and Columbia for interviewer-led reps. Those three cover the case types that actually appear in first and second round interviews, and all of them are free.
Do not download 20 casebooks. Candidates who collect PDFs almost always practice less than candidates who work one book carefully.
Casebook |
What it does best |
When to use it |
Kellogg 2020 |
Fit questions at the start of every case, numbered solving steps, print-friendly exhibits |
Your first 10 to 15 practice cases |
Booth |
Heavier quantitative work and denser exhibits |
Once structure feels automatic and math is the bottleneck |
Columbia |
Interviewer-led cases that mirror the McKinsey format |
Two to three weeks before a McKinsey round |
Yale |
One of the more recent editions in wide circulation |
Late prep, when you want current-style prompts |
The Booth casebook is the one I send candidates who keep losing the thread during exhibit interpretation. Its cases punish sloppy arithmetic in a way that surfaces the habit fast.
The Columbia casebook earns its place for a narrower reason: the interviewer-led structure forces you to answer the question asked instead of steering the case where your framework wants to go.
How Should You Practice With a Casebook?
Work through cases out loud with a partner, on a clock, with someone playing interviewer. Reading a case and its answer key builds recognition, not skill, and recognition is not what gets tested.
Here is the sequence I give candidates who have a casebook and six weeks:
-
Learn the fundamentals first: spend the first week on structuring, math, and exhibit reading before you touch a full case
-
Run 5 cases untimed: go slowly, say every step out loud, and stop to fix structures that are not exhaustive
-
Switch to live timed cases: have a partner administer the case from the interviewer notes and hold you to 30 minutes
-
Case both directions: giving a case teaches you what interviewers actually score, which is the fastest way to see your own gaps
-
Drill your weakest case type: if three straight cases went badly on breakeven math, do five breakeven cases in a row
- Finish with your target firm's format: run your last 5 cases in the style of the firm you are interviewing with
Most candidates need 25 to 40 live cases to get consistent, not the 100-plus that gets thrown around online. If you want to compress that timeline, my case interview course covers the structuring and math methods in about 7 days.
One caution about casebook answer keys. They were written by students, not interviewers, so treat a model answer as one reasonable approach rather than the correct one, especially on market sizing questions where several defensible paths exist.
Casebook math also runs cleaner than real interview math. Real cases hand you awkward numbers under time pressure, which is why separate case interview math drilling matters more than most candidates expect.
What Do Consulting Outcomes Look Like at Kelley?
Consulting is the highest paying industry destination for Kelley MBAs, with a median base salary of $175,000 for the Class of 2025 and 16.2% of the class accepting consulting roles. By job function rather than employer industry, 21.6% of the class took consulting roles.
Metric |
Class of 2024 |
Class of 2025 |
Consulting share by industry |
24.1% |
16.2% |
Consulting share by function |
29.4% |
21.6% |
Consulting median base salary |
$175,000 |
$175,000 |
Consulting base salary range |
$98,000 to $192,000 |
$102,000 to $207,000 |
Overall median base salary |
$129,000 |
$127,900 |
Source: Kelley School of Business Graduate Career Services employment statistics.
That table contains the most useful signal in this article. Consulting placement at Kelley fell by roughly a third across two graduating classes while consulting pay did not move at all.
Firms cut headcount rather than salaries, which is what always happens in a soft market. The practical consequence is that the bar moved up, so a Kelley candidate today needs a sharper case performance than a Kelley candidate two years ago needed for the same job.
Kelley's MBA consulting employers span AlixPartners, Alvarez & Marsal, Bain, Deloitte Consulting, EY-Parthenon, Guidehouse, Infosys Consulting, McKinsey, PwC, and ZS Associates. Deloitte Consulting and EY were the largest consulting hirers of the Class of 2024 with four hires each, and McKinsey hired two.
On the undergraduate side, Kelley reported that 96% of actively seeking seniors who graduated between July 2024 and June 2025 had a full-time job or graduate school acceptance within three months. Average starting salaries by major ranged from $60,739 in marketing and professional sales to $83,705 in finance, according to Kelley's undergraduate salary statistics as of October 2025.
Tips for Kelley Candidates Recruiting for Consulting
Tip #1: Apply to the Consulting Workshop in your second year
Applications are generally due by the end of December, and there is no second chance in a later year. The workshop is the single strongest consulting signal a Kelley undergraduate can put on a resume, and the Chicago firm trip alone puts you in a room with recruiters from more than a dozen firms.
Tip #2: Start casing before recruiting season opens, not after
The consulting recruiting timeline moves faster than most candidates plan for, and first-round interviews arrive weeks after applications close. Candidates who start casing in August for a January interview consistently outperform candidates who start in November.
Tip #3: Network harder than a candidate at a larger feeder school
Kelley is not among the highest volume MBB target schools, which means a referral does more work for you than it would for a Wharton candidate. Reach out to two Kelley alumni per week and ask about their work rather than about openings.
One Kelley MBA quoted in the school's own employment report credited exactly that habit with landing his consulting internship. It is unglamorous and it works.
Tip #4: Get feedback from someone who has interviewed candidates
Peer feedback plateaus quickly, because your partner can only flag mistakes they already know to look for. Someone who has sat on the interviewer side can tell you in two minutes why your structure reads as generic.
If you do not have that person in your network, case interview coaching gives you a former interviewer who scores you against the same rubric firms use.
Tip #5: Do not treat the missing casebook as a disadvantage
Interviewers have never once asked a candidate which school's casebook they trained on. Having coached hundreds of candidates through consulting recruiting, I have yet to see a rejection that traced back to case material rather than to reps.
The absence of a Kelley casebook changes nothing about your odds. What decides your outcome is how many cases you ran out loud, how honestly you diagnosed your weak spots, and whether you fixed them before the interview rather than during it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a Kelley casebook PDF I can download?
You can download the Kelley casebook here: Kelley 2018.pdf
What is the difference between the Kelley casebook and the Kellogg casebook?
Kelley is Indiana University's business school and does not publish a casebook. Kellogg is Northwestern's business school and publishes one of the most widely used free casebooks in consulting recruiting. The two names look similar, so searches for a Kelley casebook usually turn up Kellogg results. If you want practice cases, the Kellogg casebook is what you are looking for.
How do Kelley students prepare for case interviews without a casebook?
Undergraduates apply to the Consulting Workshop, a three-course sequence covering case analysis, the consulting industry, and structured thinking. MBA students join the Consulting Club, which runs casing weeks, speed casing nights, mock interview workshops, and alumni panels. Both groups also practice with free casebooks published by other business schools.
Is Kelley a target school for MBB consulting?
Kelley is a core school for Deloitte, EY, PwC, and several boutique firms, and it places a smaller number of graduates at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG each year. McKinsey hired two graduates from the MBA Class of 2024 according to Kelley's employment report. Kelley candidates targeting MBB generally need stronger networking and case performance than candidates at the largest feeder schools.
How much do Kelley MBAs earn in consulting?
The median base salary for Kelley MBA Class of 2025 graduates entering consulting was $175,000, with a reported range of $102,000 to $207,000. That figure has held steady across the last two graduating classes even as the share of the class entering consulting declined. Consulting remains the highest paying industry destination for Kelley MBAs.
How many cases should I complete before a consulting interview?
Aim for 25 to 40 live cases with a partner, not 100 cases read on your own. Reading cases teaches you what a good answer looks like but does not build the reflexes an interviewer tests. Most candidates who fail have read plenty and practiced out loud very little.
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