Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 14, 2026

 

The McDonough casebook is a free collection of practice cases built by the consulting club at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, and its widely circulated Fall 2015 edition holds 34 practice cases organized into a six-week schedule. This guide covers what is inside the book, where to find it, how good the cases actually are, and how to practice with them without picking up habits that current interviews punish.

 

Before reading on:

 

Most candidates struggle to land interviews and even fewer turn them into offers. Watch my free training to learn how to triple your chances of landing interviews and increase your chances of receiving an offer by 8x.

 

👉 Watch for free

 

Key Takeaways

 

The McDonough casebook gives you 34 free practice cases sequenced across six weeks, and it works best as a source of math and exhibit reps rather than as a model of how firms interview today.

You can download the casebook here: McDonough casebook.pdf

 

• 34 practice cases, running from profitability in week one to hard cases in week six

 

• The Fall 2015 edition is the version that circulates publicly, and it costs nothing

 

• Two market sizing warmups open the book before the profitability cases begin

 

• Front matter covers Porter's Five Forces, the 4 Cs, the 4 Ps, and contribution margin math

 

• Case data references 2007 to 2009 figures, so treat the numbers as drills and not benchmarks

 

• Skip the framework primer, because canned structures now cost you points

 

What Is the McDonough Casebook?

 

The McDonough casebook is a free PDF of practice case interviews created by the consulting club at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. The Fall 2015 edition contains 34 practice cases, a consulting industry guide, an interview preparation section, and a six-week case certification schedule that tells members exactly which cases to complete each week.

 

The book opens with a note from the club's co-directors of career development that makes one point plainly: the casebook is not meant to be your only resource. They tell members to pair it with club workshops, career center appointments, and firm-specific practice before interview day.

 

One more thing sets the tone. The authors advise finishing the whole book before touching firm-specific cases, so that firm prep can focus on what a given firm wants to see instead of doubling as a lesson in how cases work.

 

Where Can You Find the McDonough Casebook?

 

You can download the casebook here: McDonough casebook.pdf

The McDonough casebook is free, and the Fall 2015 edition is the one that surfaces publicly as a PDF on document-sharing sites. It circulates under the filename GSCG casebook, which matters because searching the school name alone mostly returns law school casebooks and unrelated titles.

 

The Georgetown Consulting Club keeps its own case preparation library, but that page sits behind a Georgetown login and is closed to outside candidates. The contents are still worth knowing, because they show what Georgetown students actually drill.

 

That library holds casebooks borrowed from other schools alongside club-written profitability, business decision, market entry, and M&A framework files. It also carries human capital and federal case sets, including a public sector case, which reflects the kind of work Washington firms hire for.

 

The McDonough casebook does not appear in our library of MBA consulting casebooks, because newer editions from other schools earn those spots on realism. That is a ranking decision rather than a dismissal, and the cases here still hold value once you know how to use them.

 

What Is Inside the McDonough Casebook?

 

The casebook runs to roughly 150 pages across four sections. The introduction sits on page 3, the consulting industry guide starts on page 5, interview preparation begins on page 9, the practice cases open on page 27, and additional resources close the book on page 149.

 

How many cases are in the McDonough casebook?

 

The McDonough casebook contains 34 practice cases. They sit inside a case certification schedule that ran from October 6 to November 22 in the 2015 recruiting cycle, with two designated super weekends built into weeks four and six.

 

That schedule is the most useful thing in the book. Even though the dates are long past, the sequence tells you the order the club believed skills should be built, and you can copy that order without belonging to any club.

 

What case types does the McDonough casebook cover?

 

The casebook covers profitability, business decision, market entry, mergers and acquisitions, interviewer-led, and hard cases, plus two market sizing warmups at the very start. The table below maps the six-week certification schedule to what each block of cases drills.

 

Week	Case type	Cases	What it drills
Week 1	Profitability	1 to 6	Revenue and cost breakdowns, opened by two market sizing warmups
Week 2	Profitability and business decision	7 to 10	Margin gaps, promotion analysis, and payback period math
Week 3	Business decision	11 to 15	Cost-benefit calls and choosing between competing options
Week 4	Market entry	16 to 21	Sizing a new market and picking an entry method
Week 5	M&A and interviewer-led	22 to 28	Deal economics and cases where the interviewer drives the flow
Week 6	Hard cases	29 to 34	Layered problems that stack the earlier skills together

 

Source: Georgetown McDonough School of Business Consulting Case Interview Book, Fall 2015 edition.

 

The named cases give you a better feel for the range than the labels do. Here are six that show what the book asks of you.

 

• Flying High: a sizing warmup asking how many people are in the air over the United States right now

 

• Drug Store Profitability: a pharmacy chain where 60% of stores run a loss and product mix is the real culprit

 

• Playing with the Law: a $46 million law firm whose profits hinge on billable hours per lawyer

 

• Choco Bars: an $800 million confectionery maker losing $200 million a year to sales discounts

 

• Airplane De-Icing: an in-source versus outsource call against a four-year payback requirement

 

• Deposit Slips: an interviewer-led price war inside a shrinking commodity market

 

Case 2 is the one most people remember, and it asks how many individual French fries McDonald's sells in the United States each year. The interviewer notes tell you the number does not matter, then hand you the follow-up that separates good candidates from great ones: if I told you your estimate was too high, which assumption would you revisit first?

 

What frameworks and reference material does it include?

 

The interview preparation section is the most dated part of the book. It walks through Porter's Five Forces, Porter's Diamond, the 4 Cs, the 4 Ps, the BCG matrix, and the product life cycle, then supplies template structures for profitability, business decision, market entry, and M&A cases.

 

Those template structures are exactly the kind of memorized case interview frameworks that top firms now treat as a warning sign. Interviewers want a structure built for the problem in front of you, not four buckets you carried in from a PDF.

 

There is a genuinely useful accounting primer buried in the same section. It separates a traditional income statement from a contribution margin income statement, then walks a five-step contribution analysis from unit contribution through break-even volume to net profit.

 

The book also lists the 20 fit questions club members were asked most often, starting with why consulting and why our firm. Those have aged far better than the frameworks, and they map cleanly onto how a consulting fit interview runs today.

 

Is the McDonough Casebook Still Worth Using?

 

The McDonough casebook is worth using for case volume and math reps, but not as a guide to how McKinsey, BCG, and Bain interview now. The cases themselves are solid drills with real exhibits and real arithmetic. The teaching layer wrapped around them is a decade old.

 

Here is what the book does well.

 

• 34 cases with interviewer notes, exhibits, and worked solutions, all free

 

• Exhibit-heavy cases that force genuine chart and table reading

 

• A six-week sequence you can copy even without belonging to the club

 

• Public sector, healthcare, and law firm cases you rarely see in other casebooks

 

• 20 fit questions pulled from real interviews rather than invented for the book

 

And here is where it falls short.

 

• The framework primer teaches canned structures that firms actively screen against

 

• Business context references 2007 to 2009 data, so the industry detail is stale

 

• Solutions were written by students rather than interviewers, so some answers run thin

 

• Exhibits lose their formatting in the extracted-text copies floating around online

 

• There is no dedicated math drill section, which the strongest casebooks all have

 

Having coached hundreds of candidates one on one, the pattern I keep seeing is that a dated casebook does its damage through the opening pages, not the cases. Candidates memorize four buckets from a 2015 primer, open every case with them, and get marked down for pattern matching. Use the cases and leave the primer alone.

 

How Should You Use the McDonough Casebook to Prepare?

 

Work the cases live with a partner, build a fresh structure every time, and ignore the framework section at the front. The six-week order is a reasonable spine once you strip out the parts that have aged badly.

 

1. Skip the framework primer: go straight to page 27 and start with the cases
   
   
2. Start with the two sizing warmups: Cases 1 and 2 build estimation reps before real profitability work begins
   
   
3. Build a custom structure each time: write buckets that fit the specific problem instead of reusing the same four
   
   
4. Do every calculation by hand: work the numbers out loud rather than reading past them
   
   
5. Time each case at 30 to 45 minutes: that is the range a real interview runs
   
   
6. Write two lines of reflection after each case: name the single thing you would do differently next time

 

Step three is where most candidates quietly cheat. Reading the sample structure before you write your own feels efficient and teaches you almost nothing, so cover the solution page until your own case interview structure is on paper.

 

A partner catches things you cannot catch alone, but only if they know what strong looks like. Once peer reps stop moving your performance, my interview coaching pairs you with a former Bain interviewer who can name the exact step where your case falls apart.

 

What Does Consulting Recruiting Look Like at Georgetown McDonough?

 

Consulting is the largest single destination for Georgetown McDonough MBAs. According to the school's 2025 MBA employment report, consulting took 25% of the Full-time MBA Class of 2025, tied with financial services, followed by technology at 16%.

 

That class earned an average base salary of $146,265 and an average signing bonus of $33,768, with 78% of graduates receiving an offer within three months of graduation. McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, EY, and PwC all appear among the top hiring companies, and 42% of full-time acceptances converted from internships.

 

Location shapes the case mix here more than at most schools. Washington recruiting pulls heavily toward public sector and federal work, which is why the club library carries federal and human capital case sets that a Chicago or Boston casebook would never bother including.

 

Undergraduates run a different clock. Georgetown's career center puts senior application deadlines between mid-July and mid-September, with first-round interviews from mid-August through early October and final rounds stretching into December.

 

Juniors sit roughly two months behind that, with deadlines from mid-September into early October. Both cycles track the broader consulting recruiting timeline at target schools, which means your casing has to be sharp before the semester starts, not during it.

 

Tips to Get the Most Out of the McDonough Casebook

 

Tip #1: Treat the 2015 data as arithmetic, not industry knowledge

 

Case 10 prices cloud storage against 2009 market share figures, and Case 24 asks you to explain ATV sales cycles through 2007. The math is still good practice. The market context will actively mislead you if you carry it into an interview.

 

Tip #2: Pair it with a newer casebook

 

One dated casebook on its own leaves gaps in how modern cases open and close. Run these cases alongside something recent, such as the Kellogg casebook, which sequences its cases by difficulty and reflects a more current interview style.

 

Tip #3: Rebuild every exhibit yourself

 

The exhibits are the strongest part of the book, and several of them degrade badly in the copies circulating online. Sketch each table by hand before you interpret it, because reading messy data quickly is the same skill that case interview graphs test in a real round.

 

Tip #4: Use the interviewer-led block for McKinsey prep

 

Week five flags its interviewer-led cases clearly, and Case 22 tells the interviewer not to let you write a framework at all. That constraint mirrors the way an MBB case interview runs at McKinsey, where the interviewer drives and you answer discrete questions.

 

Tip #5: Drill the sizing cases separately

 

Cases 1 and 2 are the only pure estimation problems in the whole book, which is thin coverage for a question type that opens plenty of interviews. Work them twice, then move to a dedicated market sizing walkthrough for current best practice.

 

Tip #6: Do not skip the profitability block because it looks easy

 

The first two weeks of the schedule cover ten of the 34 cases, and both blocks center on profitability. That weighting is deliberate, because clean revenue and cost trees carry you through harder cases later. Treat the early profitability cases as foundation work rather than a warmup to rush.

 

The McDonough casebook earns its place as free practice material, not as a curriculum. Pull the 34 cases, work them with a partner against a timer, and get your structuring and math from a source that reflects how firms interview now. If you do only one thing differently, start on page 27 and never read the framework section.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Is the McDonough casebook free?

 

Yes. The McDonough casebook was written by the consulting club at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business for its own members, and the Fall 2015 edition circulates online as a free PDF. It is student-created material, so treat it as practice content rather than an official publication from any consulting firm.

 

How many cases are in the McDonough casebook?

 

The Fall 2015 McDonough casebook contains 34 practice cases. They are grouped into a six-week case certification schedule that moves from profitability cases in week one through business decision and market entry cases to mergers, interviewer-led cases, and hard cases in the final weeks.

 

What is the GSCG casebook?

 

GSCG casebook is the filename the McDonough casebook circulates under online, because the Fall 2015 edition was signed by the club's co-directors of career development under that abbreviation. Searching the school name on its own mostly returns law school casebooks, so adding the words consulting club to your search finds the right file faster.

 

Is the McDonough casebook good for beginners?

 

It works for beginners who already understand how a case interview flows, because the early profitability cases are approachable and the interviewer notes explain what a strong answer looks like. The framework primer at the front is the risk, since it teaches canned structures that interviewers now screen against. Learn how to build a custom structure first, then use the cases for reps.

 

Can you use the McDonough casebook for MBB interviews?

 

You can use it for math and exhibit practice, but it should not be your main MBB resource. The cases give you real numbers and charts to work through, and the interviewer-led block is decent preparation for the McKinsey format. The business context dates to 2007 through 2009, and the structuring advice reflects how firms interviewed a decade ago.

 

Is there a newer McDonough casebook edition?

 

The Fall 2015 edition is the version that circulates publicly. Georgetown's consulting club maintains a current case preparation library, but that page requires a Georgetown login, so newer club material is not available to outside candidates. Pair the 2015 cases with a recent casebook from another school to cover the gap.

 

Everything You Need to Land a Consulting Offer

 

Need help passing your interviews?

• Case Interview Course: Become a top 10% case interview candidate in 7 days while saving yourself 100+ hours
  
  
• Fit Interview Course: Master 98% of consulting fit interview questions in a few hours
  
  
• Interview Coaching: Accelerate your prep with 1-on-1 coaching with Taylor Warfield, former Bain interviewer and best-selling author

 

Need help landing interviews?

• Resume Review & Editing: Craft the perfect resume with unlimited revisions and 24-hour turnaround

 

Need help with everything?

• Consulting Offer Program: Go from zero to offer-ready with a complete system

 

Not sure where to start?

• Free 40-Minute Training: Triple your chances of landing consulting interviews and 8x your chances of passing them