This approach affords students the opportunity to apply their managerial knowledge and personal experience to specific, and often messy, real-world problems. The case method is particularly effective for senior undergraduate and graduate students who have previously been exposed to a wide array of managerial tools and techniques, or have gained invaluable first-hand management experience.
Many students initially experience some difficulty when approaching a case analysis.
The purpose of this document is to introduce you to learning with cases. It discusses background issues regarding business cases and the case method, the typical anatomy of a business case, and an accepted method for structuring a case analysis. At first glance it may appear that this definition can also describe an exercise or problem found at the back of a text book, but there is an important difference. As specified in the definition, cases are actual situations , not hypothetical problems or contrived exercises. If realism was the sole distinguishing feature of business cases, then newspaper or magazine articles might suffice in the use of the case method.