BCG and Bain Online Assessments: Casey, Sova and What Each One Rewards
BCG is reported to run a chatbot case called Casey. Bain a Sova battery with no clock. What each rewards, and how both differ from McKinsey Solve.
McKinsey, BCG and Bain get grouped into one acronym and then, by candidates applying to all three, into one revision plan. That does not survive contact with the assessments. McKinsey runs a single bespoke simulation more or less everywhere. BCG runs a conversational case in most offices and something shorter elsewhere. Bain runs a standard psychometric battery in some offices, a different vendor in others, and in some roles nothing at all.
First, the honest position on sourcing
None of the three firms publishes a specification for its online stage. BCG's own case interview preparation page on careers.bcg.com describes the live case interview and links its OneDay@BCG simulation, and mentions no online case, chatbot or test stage at all. Sova publishes candidate guidance naming no clients. Bain publishes nothing.
So every number below comes from coaching firms and preparation sellers. We name them inline, because the useful question is not “is this true” but “how many independent people saw the same thing”. Where they disagree, we say so rather than picking the tidier number. A reply from your recruiter outranks all of it, and asking what the online stage contains is an ordinary question that is almost always answered.
BCG: the Casey chatbot case
Casey is not an aptitude test. It is a case interview delivered through a chat window, with a bot asking the questions instead of a consultant. You work a single business problem from framing through to recommendation, and the interface looks closer to a messaging app than to a test platform. The strongest reporting on it comes from StrategyCase, MConsultingPrep, CaseBasix and MyConsultingCoach, and they broadly agree on the shape while differing on the exact numbers.
What Casey rewards shows up in the first question rather than the last. Candidates report that the case often opens by presenting a set of possible data sources and asking which ones matter before any analysis happens. That is a structuring question wearing a multiple-choice costume, and it is a signal BCG could not extract from a numerical reasoning item.
The arithmetic then has to be right first time, because you cannot go back and repair it. A chained calculation starting from a mis-keyed figure produces a confident, unrecoverable wrong answer. Working on paper and only then typing is slower per question and faster overall.
BCG's other online screens, and why your friend sat a different test
Casey is not the only thing BCG has sent. MyConsultingCoach describes a separate, shorter screen it calls the CCA, around 30 to 35 minutes of reasoning and behavioural questions rather than a case, and says it is SHL-based. The same page describes office-specific variations, including a 30 minute cognitive test in Switzerland and a short numerical assessment in the UK, and states plainly that BCG does not run one identical online assessment everywhere.
Older formats circulate too. StrategyCase describes Casey's predecessor, the Potential Test, as closer to 45 minutes with about 23 questions and no video, and dates the Casey rollout to around 2020, starting in Asian offices. Game-based screening has also been associated with BCG at various points. Our BCG assessment page holds the SHL association at medium confidence for exactly this reason: the sources describe real things, but possibly real things from another office in another year. A 2023 guide can be accurate and still wrong for you.
Bain: the test with no clock, when there is a test at all
Bain's online stage is reported across many independent preparation sources to run on Sova, and the qualifications come from those same sources. PrepLounge states that some offices and roles require no digital assessment at all and that others use TestGorilla instead. CaseBasix dates a TestGorilla introduction to 2024. GraduatesFirst lists Sova, TestGorilla or HireVue depending on office and role, and describes a short video-recorded component in some processes.
If the invitation arrives from sovaonline.com, it is Sova.
The defining feature is the missing countdown. Nothing expires, and every source that discusses scoring says your pace is recorded and forms part of the result. PrepLounge describes a blended speed and accuracy score reported as a percentile against a norm group, with no published pass mark, and says consistent accuracy is what puts candidates in the top 20 to 30 per cent.
Sova publishes no Bain-specific spec, but its candidate preparation hub tells every candidate to “Complete all tasks in one sitting, if possible”, to have “a pen, paper and calculator for the ability questions”, and that “time is not recorded on the video recording sections, so this will not affect your results”. That last sentence is the closest thing to first-party confirmation that time is recorded on the sections that are not video.
What the three assessments actually reward
This is where grouping them together does real damage, because preparation that helps at one firm is close to wasted at another.
The one thing all three share is that a calculator does not save you. Solve hands you a basic one and a great deal of data to filter, Casey hands you one and no route back to fix a bad figure, and Sova assumes one is on the desk while timing how long you take to use it. In each case the bottleneck is knowing which number you need.
If you are preparing for McKinsey too, the invitation email carries more information than anything else you have: our guide to what the Solve invitation length tells you about the test explains why 65 minutes and 85 minutes are two different assessments.
What to do when you do not know which test you are getting
- Email the recruiter. One reply gives you the vendor, the length and usually the sections. Nothing else on this page is as reliable.
- Check the sender domain when the invitation lands. sovaonline.com means Sova. A BCG-hosted chat interface means Casey. Ten seconds, no guesswork.
- Drill numerical speed regardless. Every version of every MBB online stage rewards handling quantitative information quickly and correctly, and it transfers to the case interviews too. Timed numerical practice is the highest return hour available.
- Start casing before you pass the screen. The gap between an online stage and a first round is often days, and casing takes weeks. At all three firms the interviews, not the screen, decide the outcome.
What is genuinely not known
Nobody outside these firms knows the cut score for any of these assessments, or whether a cut score is even the mechanism rather than a ranking. Nobody can tell you how heavily BCG weights the video against the written answers, or how Sova converts response time into a score. And nobody can tell you which test your office is running this cycle, because the firms change it without announcing it.
Which is the argument for the boring advice. Practise the Sova sections against your own benchmark so you know what your pace feels like, work a case out loud so the Casey video is not the first time you have delivered a recommendation in sixty seconds, and ask the recruiter. Our Bain and BCG pages track what we can evidence as it changes.