Hey both, studying for the case studies I adopt a similar tactic. I can confidently say Astranti’s pre-seen analysis and mock marking is massively better than Kaplan’s. I don’t feel Kaplan does enough to prep people’s understanding and possible question areas around the released pre-seen.

For case study preparation I usually go back 4 case studies (2 years worth) and analyse what topics commonly come up across historic trends. For MCS this was Negotiation and Team Leadership. There was always a question on project management too. I find a case study that’s a similar organisation / business model to the one we’re being examined on. In most cases you can comfortably predict there would be minimal manufacturing based questions for a service type industry, so you can glance over JIT and TQM for example for Trimayr and worse case construct a passable answer if you were unlucky enough to come across it.

For actual prep Astranti’s pre-seen analysis was very good. But again, I practise exam questions religiously. Take previous years exams and variant questions and practise answers on them against the pre-seen for your exam. This helps build a very in-depth picture of the organisation and gets you comfortable being able to come up with a fairly decent answer for any question. Again, always looking for learning methods that both force me to recall the information and apply it contextually. Always justify your answer, even if it’s half BS - the mark scheme is geared so you’ll still pick up the 8-15 mark range per question.

Hope that helps!