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This happened to a friend in his interviews last year. He politely told them that he was familiar with the case, and they quickly switched to another one. I've never had this happen/heard of this happening at MBB interviews, though. In fact, one of my Bain case interviews was made up by my interviewer based on a trip he took for his last vacation.
I don't think it's that common an occurrence, although i guess it might happen if you interview in many places for both SA, and then again for FT.
Why did your friend tell the interviewer that he was familiar with the case? Wouldn't it be to his advantage to simply solve a case that he had already done before?
They address this in "Case in Point," but I think the argument goes it will probably be evident that you've done it before given how fast you will solve it and how you seem to already know how everything needs to be segmented, etc. It's hard to recreate genuine discovery. That being said, I think most people would still just roll with it.
I have heard of this happening, for two reasons: 1) people with alumni/friends at MBB have those friends give them a practice case or two, which in turn come from the case bank (especially true if a particular office, i.e. NYC, tends to prefer a smaller subset of the cases) and 2) a case from MBB winding up in a casebook without them knowing it. I've heard of one person having an MBB interview and realizing several months later that the same case was in the Darden 2012 casebook.
1) "Practice" cases and interview cases are kept strictly separate. I'm sure it's happened before that an interview case has leaked out or whatnot, but it's not as casual as you imply--I'm pretty sure leaking an interview case would get one fired. 2) This is the reason why almost all case interviewers will collect your notes and whatnot. Obviously they can't confiscate your memory, so I suppose it could happen.
Have never heard of this happening. At least for all of my interviews, the cases I got were based on actual engagements my interviewers had been on.
Echoing devildog. No way this can happen unless someone royally screws up. At my MBB, practice cases are never used in real life interviews. And if an AC/A1/BA leaked one of the real life one, he'd get fired.
Yeah that's what I thought as well. I was just a bit confused because there were so many MBB cases in MBA casebooks that I was wondering where they were all coming from. So are those all practice cases? Are there really that many legit MBB practice cases out there?
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