Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 22, 2026

 

The Tepper casebook is a free 91-page collection of practice consulting cases assembled by the Tepper Consulting Club at Carnegie Mellon University, and the edition that circulates publicly dates to 2008. This guide breaks down what is actually inside it, where to find it, how it stacks up against newer casebooks, and how to drill its cases so the practice shows up in your interview performance.

 

Before reading on:

 

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Key Takeaways

 

The Tepper casebook is a good source of raw practice volume and excellent math reps, but it is old enough that you should treat it as a drill book rather than as your main preparation curriculum.

You can download the casebook here: Tepper casebook.pdf

 

• 91 pages of cases put together by the Tepper Consulting Club, each tagged with the firm, the year, and the interview round

 

• The public edition is from 2008, so the case styles predate how McKinsey and BCG run interviews today

 

• Strongest for cost-side profitability work, technology and operations cases, and arithmetic under pressure

 

• Carnegie Mellon does not host it publicly, and the Consulting Club keeps its current material inside the club

 

• Consulting took 35.7% of accepted offers in the Tepper MBA Class of 2025, more than any other industry

 

• Work through 8 to 12 of its cases out loud with a partner instead of silently reading all of them

 

What Is the Tepper Casebook?

 

The Tepper casebook is a free PDF of practice case interviews compiled by the Tepper Consulting Club at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. The publicly available edition runs 91 pages, dates to 2008, and labels every case with the consulting firm that asked it, the year, and the interview round it came from.

 

That firm-and-round tagging is the casebook's best feature. Most student-built casebooks give you a case and a suggested answer with no indication of where the case came from. Tepper's tells you that a given prompt was a first-round question at a specific firm, which lets you calibrate difficulty instead of guessing.

 

The cases were contributed by Tepper MBA students who had just finished recruiting. Each one is stamped "Tepper Consulting Club: Proprietary and Confidential" in the footer, which tells you it was built for members rather than for public release.

 

What Is Inside the Tepper Casebook?

 

Each case is laid out as a short deck rather than a page of prose. You get a problem statement narrative, an explicit objective, a block of guidance written for the person playing interviewer, and a list of numbers to hand over only when the candidate asks for them. A handful of cases also include full interviewer and candidate dialogue.

 

Element	What you get	How useful it is today
Problem statement	A short client narrative plus a stated objective, split across numbered pages	High. Prompts read much like real ones
Interviewer guidance	Notes telling your partner what to push on and what to withhold	High. Makes partner practice easy to run
Data on request	Bulleted figures released only when the candidate asks for them	High. Trains you to ask before assuming
Firm and round tags	Company, year, and round printed on every case header	Medium. Firms have changed since 2008
Sample dialogue	Line-by-line interviewer and candidate exchanges on selected cases	Medium. Useful mechanics, dated answers
Exhibits	Sparse. Most data arrives verbally rather than as charts	Low. Modern interviews lean on exhibits

 

The cases skew toward cost reduction, technology spend, and operations. One first-round case from a technology consultancy hands you a financial services client with a $1.5 billion annual IT budget and 100,000 employees, of whom 6,000 sit in IT, and asks whether an outsourcing vendor can really strip 10% off that number. It is a clean cost-structure drill.

 

Another gives you a $3 billion transportation and shipping company whose margins have slid to 3% to 5% against a 10% target in a market growing 4% to 5% a year. Revenue is explicitly off the table, so you have to work the cost side properly. Cases like this are why the book still earns its place in a rotation of profitability cases.

 

A third walks through a customer relationship management software purchase where the license runs $5 million, maintenance adds 15% of the price, and consulting fees add another $7.5 million. The candidate is pushed to find the hidden costs nobody quoted. Having coached hundreds of candidates one on one, I can tell you that "what costs are missing from this number" is still one of the most common ways interviewers separate careful thinkers from fast ones.

 

Where Can You Download the Tepper Casebook?

 

You can download the casebook here: Tepper casebook.pdf

 

Current Tepper students get their material a different way. The Tepper Consulting Club lists interview prep, mentorship, and consulting treks among its member benefits, and any live case material stays with its 107 members rather than going online.

 

Do not spend an afternoon hunting for a newer Tepper edition. It is not public. Your time is better spent pulling a second and third book from the wider set of MBA consulting casebooks that are updated regularly.

 

How Does the Tepper Casebook Compare to Other MBA Casebooks?

 

Tepper sits in the second tier. It is smaller than the biggest casebooks, it has fewer exhibits, and its 2008 vintage puts it well behind books that get refreshed every year or two. What it does have is unusually clear interviewer guidance and honest firm tagging.

 

Casebook	Rough size	Best for	Main weakness
Tepper	91 pages	Cost cases, technology spend, partner-run drills	Dated, very few exhibits
Kellogg	26 cases	Difficulty-sequenced practice from easy to hard	Heavier time commitment
Columbia	20 plus cases	Realistic prompts with solid exhibit work	Uneven answer quality
Firm-published cases	40 plus cases	Seeing exactly how a target firm runs its interview	Too few for volume practice

 

The practical order is simple. Start with cases the firms publish themselves so you learn the current format, then add a current student-built book such as the Kellogg casebook for structured volume, and bring in Tepper when you want extra cost-side and arithmetic reps.

 

One warning about the front matter. The 2008 book teaches frameworks the way people taught them in 2008, which means memorizing a handful of templates and applying whichever one fits. That approach gets punished today, and building custom case interview frameworks from the specifics of the prompt is what separates strong candidates from rehearsed ones.

 

What Does Consulting Recruiting Look Like at Tepper?

 

Consulting is the single biggest destination for Tepper MBAs. According to the Tepper School's 2025 MBA Employment Report Summary, 35.7% of the Class of 2025 accepted offers in the consulting industry, ahead of technology at 25.1% and financial services at 9.9%.

 

The money is why. Graduates entering management and strategy consulting reported a median base salary of $184,000 against a class-wide median of $160,000, with an average signing bonus of $38,610 and average total compensation of $186,043 across the class. Five of the ten largest employers of the Class of 2025 were consulting firms: PwC, McKinsey, Deloitte, Boston Consulting Group, and Kearney.

 

Internship numbers tell the same story. Consulting took 22.9% of accepted summer internships, and interns in management and strategy consulting reported a median monthly base of $15,458. Those are the offers the casebook is meant to help you win.

 

The support behind those numbers is real. Carnegie Mellon's Masters Career Center ran 3,700 one-to-one coaching sessions and hosted 275 recruiting events in the 2024 to 2025 year. The school also reported in December 2025 that 83% of graduates had an offer within three months and that 73% of accepted full-time offers came through the school's own recruiting channels.

 

That last number is the one to sit with. Cases win interviews, but the network gets you the interview in the first place. Anyone going through consulting MBA recruiting should treat the casebook as one input rather than the whole plan.

 

How Should You Use the Tepper Casebook to Prepare for Case Interviews?

 

Use it as a drill book, not a textbook. The right sequence is to learn the mechanics somewhere else, then use Tepper's cases as reps against a live partner who follows the interviewer guidance. Here is the order I give candidates.

 

1. Learn the fundamentals first: know how to structure, drive, and close a case before you open any casebook
   
   
2. Read one full case as the interviewer: this shows you how the guidance and data releases are meant to work
   
   
3. Run 8 to 12 cases out loud: alternate roles with a partner so you see both sides of the table
   
   
4. Write a short reflection after each one: note the single thing you would do differently, not a full recap
   
   
5. Re-run your two worst cases a week later: repeating a case you fumbled is worth more than three new ones

 

Alternating roles matters more than most candidates expect. Playing interviewer for a case you have already solved forces you to hear what a vague structure actually sounds like from the other chair. Finding a case interview practice partner is the highest-return thing you can do in your first week of preparation.

 

Case interviews are the whole game in consulting recruiting. If you want to learn them quickly, my case interview course walks you through proven strategies in as little as 7 days.

 

What Tips Will Get You the Most Out of the Tepper Casebook?

 

Tip #1: Mine it for math, not for frameworks

 

The arithmetic in these cases has aged perfectly. A $1.5 billion budget split across 6,000 employees is the same calculation today as it was in 2008, and running those numbers without a calculator is exactly the skill interviewers test. Pull the numbers out of five cases and drill them as pure mental math before you ever solve the case.

 

Tip #2: Rebuild every structure from scratch

 

Cover the suggested answer before you start. Build your own structure, then compare. In my experience at Bain, the candidates who failed were almost never the ones who missed a bucket, they were the ones whose structure was clearly borrowed from a book.

 

Tip #3: Add exhibits the casebook does not have

 

Data in the Tepper book arrives verbally. Real interviews slide a chart across the table and wait. Have your partner sketch the numbers as a quick bar or line chart so you get reps reading charts and graphs under time pressure.

 

Tip #4: Time the recommendation

 

Most candidates run out of clock and mumble their conclusion. Set a hard 60-second limit and deliver a lead-with-the-answer summary at the end of every case you practice. A crisp final recommendation is the last thing your interviewer hears and the thing they write down.

 

Tip #5: Do not skip the estimation questions

 

Several cases open with a sizing question buried inside the prompt. Those are worth isolating and repeating, because market sizing shows up in first rounds constantly and is the easiest part of the interview to get reliably good at.

 

What Mistakes Should You Avoid With the Tepper Casebook?

 

The failure mode I see most often is treating a casebook as a syllabus. Candidates grind through 40 cases, can recite a profitability tree in their sleep, and then freeze the moment an interviewer asks something the template does not cover. Volume without reflection builds motion, not skill.

 

• Reading silently: you cannot practice communication in your head, so every case has to be spoken out loud

 

• Trusting the sample answers: these were written by students who had passed interviews, not by interviewers who ran them

 

• Assuming 2008 firm tags still hold: a case labeled first round at a given firm tells you little about how that firm interviews now

 

• Using it as your only source: pair it with firm-published case interview examples so you see the current format

 

Getting honest feedback is the other half of this. Reading your own performance is nearly impossible, which is why interview coaching is worth it once you have 10 or so cases under your belt.

 

Used well, the Tepper casebook gives you sharp cost-side reps and clean interviewer guidance that makes partner practice painless. Used badly, it teaches you to pattern-match your way through a 2008 interview that no longer exists. Pick 8 to 12 of its cases, run every one of them out loud with a partner, and write down one fix after each.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Is the Tepper casebook free?

 

Yes. The Tepper casebook has always been distributed free to students and the 2008 edition circulates openly on public document-sharing sites. Carnegie Mellon does not sell it and does not host a public download on its own website.

 

How many cases are in the Tepper casebook?

 

The 2008 edition runs 91 pages. Most cases take three to five pages once you count the prompt, the interviewer guidance, and the data releases, which works out to roughly 15 to 20 full cases plus front-matter material on frameworks and interview mechanics.

 

Is the Tepper casebook still worth using?

 

Yes, for drilling. The math, the cost breakdowns, and the structuring reps hold up fine because business arithmetic has not changed. Treat the case styles and the framework advice as dated, and get your sense of current interview format from cases the firms publish themselves.

 

Does the Tepper Consulting Club publish a new casebook every year?

 

Not publicly. The club runs interview prep, mentorship, and consulting treks for its members, and any current case material stays inside the club. The 2008 edition is the version that escaped into general circulation, which is why it is the one you will find online.

 

How many Tepper MBAs go into consulting?

 

Consulting accounted for 35.7% of accepted full-time offers for the Tepper School MBA Class of 2025, the largest share of any industry. Graduates entering management and strategy consulting reported a median base salary of $184,000.

 

Do I need to be a Carnegie Mellon student to use the Tepper casebook?

 

No. Casebooks were written for the club that produced them, but nothing in them is school-specific once you get past the introduction. Candidates from any school, and undergraduates and experienced hires as well, can practice the cases without any Carnegie Mellon affiliation.

 

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