McKinsey, BCG, and Bain each replaced part of their first-round screening with a digital assessment, but the three tests measure almost entirely different things. McKinsey Solve is a problem-solving simulation disguised as a game. BCG’s Casey is a chatbot-led case interview. Bain’s SOVA is a psychometric test with no case content at all. Candidates who prepare for the wrong one waste weeks on the wrong skill set.
Why All Three Firms Built Digital Screens
Live case interviews are expensive to run at scale — every hour an associate spends interviewing is an hour not billed to a client. Digital assessments let firms screen thousands of applicants before committing partner and consultant time to in-person rounds. McKinsey, BCG, and Bain each solved this problem differently, which is why the three tests look nothing alike despite serving the same purpose.
| Firm | Assessment | What It Tests | When It’s Given |
|---|---|---|---|
| McKinsey | Solve (formerly PST / Imbellus game) | Problem-solving, systems thinking, data interpretation | Before first-round interviews |
| BCG | Casey chatbot | Case structuring, math, written synthesis | First round, alongside or instead of a live case |
| Bain | SOVA | Numerical/verbal/abstract reasoning, situational judgment, personality | After resume screen, before first-round interviews |
McKinsey Solve: A Problem-Solving Simulation, Not a Case
McKinsey Solve (also called the Problem Solving Game or, by its vendor name, the Imbellus assessment) replaced the old multiple-choice Problem Solving Test. The 2026 version runs roughly 85 minutes across three modules: Red Rock Study, Sea Wolf (an ecosystem/ocean-cleanup simulation), and Sustainable Futures Lab. None of them look like a business case — there’s no client, no revenue figures, no slide deck.
What’s actually being measured is how you approach an unfamiliar system: how you form hypotheses, test them against new information, and revise your approach when the data contradicts your first theory. McKinsey’s scoring algorithm cares less about your final answer and more about the sequence of decisions you made to get there — in our analysis of candidate reports, test-takers who moved too fast to a single hypothesis and never revisited it scored lower than those who ran multiple small experiments first.
flowchart LR
A[Invitation Email] --> B[Red Rock Study]
B --> C[Sea Wolf Ecosystem Game]
C --> D[Sustainable Futures Lab]
D --> E{Algorithmic Score}
E -->|Pass| F[First-Round Case Interviews]
E -->|Fail| G[Rejected]
How to prepare: Since there’s no business content to memorize, practice is about process, not frameworks. Run timed simulations so the interface and pacing aren’t a surprise, and deliberately practice revising a hypothesis mid-task rather than anchoring on your first guess. For a full module-by-module walkthrough, see our McKinsey Solve preparation guide.
BCG Casey: A Chatbot Running an Actual Case
Casey is BCG’s online case interview, delivered entirely through a chat interface instead of a human. You get 7-8 questions in a 25-30 minute window, covering a real business scenario — the kind you’d recognize from BCG’s case library, not a game. Questions alternate between multiple choice (math answers, “what would you analyze next”) and short open-response text, and the whole thing ends with a 60-second recorded video recommendation (you get two takes).
Casey is interviewer-led by design: you can’t ask it clarifying questions the way you would a live interviewer, so a misread assumption early on can cascade through several later questions since some answers depend on earlier ones. Time pressure, not difficulty, is the main failure mode we see candidates report — the underlying math and structuring tasks are no harder than a standard first-round case.
flowchart TD
A[Casey Opens Case] --> B[Multiple Choice: Math + Structuring]
B --> C[Open Response: 2-3 Line Written Analysis]
C --> D[More MC/Open Response, 7-8 Qs Total]
D --> E[60-Second Video Recommendation]
E --> F[2 Takes Allowed]
How to prepare: Practice the written-synthesis skill specifically — summarizing an analytical conclusion in 2-3 lines under time pressure is a different muscle than talking through it out loud. Drill case math until it’s close to automatic, since Casey leaves no room for an interviewer to nudge you past a stuck calculation. BCG also gives you one practice case before the real one — treat it as seriously as the actual assessment.
Bain SOVA: No Case Content, Pure Psychometrics
SOVA is the outlier of the three — it’s not a case at all. Bain’s test, built with UK assessment firm Sova, has five sections: mathematical reasoning (chart and table reading), verbal reasoning (passage comprehension), abstract reasoning (pattern completion), situational judgment (ranking workplace responses), and personality. It’s untimed overall, but you’re scored on speed as well as accuracy — correct-and-fast answers rank above correct-and-slow.
Because situational judgment and personality sections have no “right” answer in the traditional sense, you can’t cram for them the way you’d drill case math. What you can control is the mathematical, verbal, and abstract reasoning sections, which reward the same quantitative fluency and pattern recognition that case prep already builds.
| SOVA Section | What It Measures | Prep Value |
|---|---|---|
| Mathematical | Chart/table reading, calculation speed | High — same skill as case math |
| Verbal | Reading comprehension, true/false/cannot-say | Medium — timed reading practice helps |
| Abstract Reasoning | Pattern recognition, sequence completion | Medium — practice tests build pattern-matching speed |
| Situational Judgment | Workplace decision ranking | Low — reflects judgment, not coachable content |
| Personality | Self-report ranking | None — authentic responses only |
How to prepare: Don’t over-invest here. Since roughly three of the five sections respond to normal case-math and reasoning practice you’re likely already doing, the highest-value use of extra prep time is timed numerical and abstract-reasoning drills, not SOVA-specific study. For the full section-by-section breakdown, see our Bain SOVA test preparation guide.
Side-by-Side: Which Test Actually Resembles a Case Interview?
Of the three, only Casey tests the thing you’ll actually be interviewed on — a real business problem with structuring, math, and a recommendation. Solve tests the cognitive process behind casing (hypothesis formation, revision under new information) without any business content. SOVA tests neither — it’s a general aptitude and personality screen that happens to sit in the consulting recruiting funnel.
This matters for how you allocate prep time. If you’re applying to all three firms, don’t assume Solve practice transfers to Casey, or that acing SOVA says anything about your case performance — they’re testing different constructs almost by design.
Practicing for All Three at Once
The one thing all three assessments reward, directly or indirectly, is the same underlying skill: structuring an ambiguous problem quickly and reasoning cleanly under time pressure. That’s exactly what case interview practice builds, which is why solid case prep still transfers even to a company you’ve never cased with live.
This is where CasesCoach’s AI practice modes map onto each test’s actual demand. If you’re prepping for McKinsey Solve, Guided Mode gives you an AI interviewer that offers hints and structure as you work through a case — useful for building the hypothesis-and-revise habit Solve rewards, before you’re under real time pressure. If Casey or a live BCG case is on your calendar, Expert Mode simulates the pressure of a real interviewer-led session with no hand-holding, closer to Casey’s unforgiving, no-clarifying-questions format. And if you want to go beyond frameworks and practice working an actual business problem end to end — background, framework selection, data analysis, synthesis — Chat with Case walks you through a real case in five stages so you’re reasoning the way an interviewer (or Casey) expects, not just reciting a memorized structure.
Every AI session scores you across five dimensions — Structure, Analysis, Communication, Business judgment, and Math — so you can see exactly which part of your casing (not just your SOVA-style reasoning speed) needs work before the real assessment.
Key Takeaways
- McKinsey Solve is a ~85-minute, three-module simulation (Red Rock Study, Sea Wolf, Sustainable Futures Lab) that scores your problem-solving process, not business knowledge
- BCG Casey is a 25-30 minute chatbot-delivered case with 7-8 questions and a recorded video recommendation — the only one of the three that’s a real case
- Bain SOVA is a five-section psychometric test (math, verbal, abstract, situational judgment, personality) with no case content and limited “coachability”
- Don’t assume prep for one test transfers to another — they measure almost entirely different constructs
- Case-interview fundamentals (structuring, math speed, clean synthesis) are the highest-leverage prep across all three, since only SOVA sits outside that skill set entirely
- Practicing with an AI mock interview that scores Structure, Analysis, Communication, Business, and Math gives you a read on exactly where your casing stands before any of these assessments
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