#MENTAL MATH PRACTICE HOW TO#

Division and multiplicationīig division and multiplication are staples of case interviews. For each skill, we'll walk through examples of how it may appear in a case interview. Let's get into the nitty gritty of what type of math you'll see in your case interviews. The case math skills you need to master (Top) This is exactly what consulting firms need from their consultants, and that's why they test for it in their interviews. Our quick numerical analysis drove the process forward and helped to prioritize our efforts towards potentially more high-yield solutions. Whatever the solution ends up being, we know that supplier negotiations alone won't cut it. Maybe we can increase sales through promotional activity in addition to cutting costs through supplier negotiations. This quick analysis is a powerful tool because it allows a team to quickly pivot to other aspects of the profitability problem. Faced with this hypothesis, a good consultant would be able to quickly disprove it, maybe even during the meeting in which it was proposed! A 2% margin increase would produce $2 of marginal profit per unit, and if sales remain steady we would only see a $1 million improvement in profitability. We know from previous experience with a similar client that supplier negotiations would at most improve margins by 2%. The partner on the case's hypothesis is that increasing the profit margin through supplier negotiations will make that happen. She's set a target of $5 million in profit improvement. The average margin on these products is $100, and they sell about 500,000 units per year. Given a problem, consultants come up with a hypothesis for a solution and then do analysis to confirm or disprove that hypothesis.įor example, let's say the CEO of a large consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) player is looking to improve the profitability of an underperforming product line. Workflow on a management consulting case is an iterative, hypothesis-driven process. A candidate's ability to prioritize analyses by quickly doing math to rule out areas which don't need further analysis.A candidate's ability to quickly confirm or disprove a hypothesis.

While it's true that you'll have plenty of analytics tools around you to do simple, and more often quite complex, calculations while on the job, that's not what case math is testing for.Ĭonsulting firms use case math to test two things: The obvious question for most candidates is 'Why am I being tested on these mental math abilities? Won't I have Excel for that when I'm on the job?' What case math problems are really testing (Top)

#MENTAL MATH PRACTICE HOW TO#

In this article, we walk through why consulting firms use case math in their interviews, the essential case math skills and examples of how they can come up, and some tips for how to prepare.

Mental math practice