Disclaimer: This kit is provided for information only.

It is not comprehensive, and we

recommend that you simply utilise it to improve your preparation.
Some General Questions:
1. Tell me something about yourself? (Introduction)
2. Why do you wish to do an MBA?
3. What is your expectation from this course?
4. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
5. Tell us about a challenge you faced in college/work and how you’ve dealt
with the same. What were your learnings?
6. Why did you choose this specialisation?
7. What are your short/long term goals?
8. Do you have any hobbies/interests?
9. Do you play or follow any sport? Have you followed this recent thing [X]
in your sport?
10. Where are you from? Tell us something interesting about this place.
11. How has COVID affected the work-life balance of professionals across
various fields of work and could firms have done a better job?
12. Tell us about a situation where you’ve dealt with a conflict in your team
and how did you handle it?
13. Why do you wish to pursue an MBA from SPJIMR?
14. What do you think would help you survive your MBA journey? Team-
work or competitive strategies focussing on yourself? Why?
15. How has your work-experience/ college experience shaped your career
aspirations?
16. What do you think you bring to the table? Why should we select you?
Marketing- Key terms
1. 4Ps versus 7Ps of Marketing
2. Philip Kotler
3. Sales
4. Marketing versus Sales
5. Marketing versus Advertising
6. Consumer
7. Consumer versus Customer
8. Favourite Advertisement and why
9. Favourite Brand and why
10. CGI in marketing as a recent trend
11. Guerrilla Marketing
12. Digital Marketing and the strategies it encompasses
13. STP
14. Branding
15. B2B versus B2C Marketing basics
16. D2C Marketing
17. Word-of-mouth Marketing
18. Buyer Persona
19. CTR (Click-through rate)
20. Ansoff Matrix
21. Conversion Rate
22. CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
23. SEO
24. User Experience (UX)
25. Examples of famous brands and their parent companies
26. Differentiation
27. Price discrimination
28. PoD versus PoP
Marketing- Sample questions
1. What do you think are the essential skills for a career in marketing?
2. What do you mean by a target market?
3. How has COVID affected the marketing industry?
4. Tell us about a company who you feel is not doing marketing up to
their desired level? What can you, as a future manager suggest to
them?
5. How different is digital marketing in comparison to traditional
marketing?
6. Take a discontinued product like Cadbury Bytes, and describe how
you will market it today?
7. What do you mean by inbound marketing?
8. What is the use of numbers and analytics in a field like marketing?
9. You have 2 products: toothpaste (short sales cycle) and furniture
(long sales cycle). How will you sell them and what differences exist in
each of these cases?
10. What is the future of marketing, given rapid developments in the tech
space?
11. As a marketing graduate, you may initially work as an ASM. Do you
think you possess what the role entails?
12. How do you think the behaviour of a consumer will differ while
buying a hedonic product (a designer bag) versus a utilitarian product
(instant noodles)?
13. What do you think are some ethical concerns regarding how brands
market and communicate the value that users might derive from a
product? Do you think they exaggerate it?
14. Can you explain the Value Pricing Thermometer or the Value Stick?
Finance- Key terms
1. Financial Statements
2. Income Statement
3. Balance Sheet
4. Cash Flow Statement
a. Cash Flow from Operating Activities
b. Cash Flow from Investing Activities
c. Cash Flow from Financing Activities
5. Types of Financial Markets:
a. Money Market
b. Capital Market
i. Primary Market
ii. Secondary Market
6. Financial instruments (Ex - Derivatives - swaps, future, forwards, etc.)
7. Assets (Fixed and Current)
8. Liabilities (Long term, short term & shareholders’ equity)
9. Debit & Credit
10. Depreciation
11. Capital Structure
12. NPV & IRR
13. YTM
14. Financial Ratios
15. Operating and Financial Leverage
16. Accounting equation
17. Types of bonds
18. Valuation
19. Company Act
20. Types of business structures
Finance- Sample questions
1. What do you mean by the financial statements? What are its types?
How are they interlinked with each other? State the treatment of
prepaid expenses in each of the financial statements?
2. What is the market cap of a company? Is it the same as the net worth
of the company?
3. What is depreciation? Why do we calculate it? What is the rate of
depreciation on furniture?
4. Compute the depreciation on the chair you are sitting by both
methods?
5. With a lot of failed IPO launches by top Indian Start-ups, can you tell
where are they going wrong and what remedial steps should they
take?
6. Name a company that you felt handled the COVID situation properly?
How did its competitor fare?
7. Difference between cost, financial, and management accounting.
8. What is the difference between operating leverage and financial
leverage?
9. Name some industries that profited due to the onset of Pandemic.
How can they sustain it as the effect of COVID reduces?
10. What are the different types of valuation methods?
11. As a bank manager, would you be okay giving a loan to a company
with high debt-equity ratio? Why or why not?
12. What is your take on the Fintech landscape in India?
13. What do you know about UPI?
14. What do you know about BNPL and Rupay cards?
Operations and SCM- Key terms
1. Cycle Time
2. Lead Time
3. Bottleneck
4. Lean Production
5. Forecasting and the type of methods
6. Supply Chain Management
7. Bullwhip Effect
8. Logistics
9. Upstream SC
10. Downstream SC
11. Reverse SC
12. Integration of Supply Chains
13. Six Sigma
14. Project-Management activities
15. Economic Order Quantity versus Newsvendor Model
16. Cost Optimisation
17. Network Logistics
18. Process Analysis and related terminology
19. Inventory Management and related terminology
20. Make to Stock (MTS)
21. Assemble to Order (ATO)
22. Make to Order (MTO)
23. Total Quality Management (TQM)
24. Lean Management:
a. Seven Wastes
b. 5S
c. Kanban
d. Kaizen
25. Just-in-Time (JIT) versus Just-in-Case
Operations and SCM- Sample questions
1. What are the different methods to measure quality?
2. What are the inventory management practices in your workplace?
Can you suggest some improvements to the current condition?
3. How will the supply chain management differ for a soap company
compared to that of a car company?
4. How did the pandemic affect Supply Chains across the globe?
5. What are the latest advances in the field of Supply Chain
Management? How has digitisation affected this field?
6. How can firms adopt sustainable methods in their Supply Chain
Management? Give some successful examples.
7. What does the Supply Chain of an E-commerce company look like? Is
it different from that seen in other industries? How so?
8. How do quick delivery services like Dunzo deal with their inventory
and supply chain management?
9. How can you make an industry like Fast Fashion sustainable?
10. What is the latest news you came across in the Supply Chain domain?
11. Are you aware about the Evergreen ship getting stuck in the Suez
Canal? What are the learnings of SCM that you can derive from the
incident?
12. What do you know about the Semiconductor chip-shortages and how
do you think supply-chains should be redesigned accordingly?
13. What do you think of Zara when it comes to supply-chain strategies?
14. How do you think the supply chain of Benetton would vary to say
Walmart to say Amazon basis their business models?
Information Management- Key terms
1. Types of Data Analytics:
a. Descriptive
b. Diagnostic
c. Predictive
d. Prescriptive
2. Cloud Computing and type of clouds: Private, Public & Hybrid
3. Types of cloud services:
a. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
b. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
c. Software as a Service (SaaS)
4. Big Data and types of Big Data:
Structured, Unstructured & Semi-Structured
5. 5V’s of Big Data
6. AI and its types
7. AI and its increasing dependence across various domains
8. GPT model and what all it entails
9. Machine Learning and its types
10. Block chain and its types
11. Cryptocurrency
12. Augmented Reality
13. Virtual Reality
14. Metaverse
15. How may ChatGPT, Bard and CoPilot differ from one another
16. ERP systems
17. CRM systems
18. Product Management
19. Tech consulting
20. Process Management
Information Management- Sample questions
1. How can Indian firms utilise Metaverse fruitfully?
2. What are some of the use cases of Block chain?
3. How should a firm decide on their cloud service provider? Describe
parameters.
4. What is your opinion on industry 4.0?
5. What do you understand about the term ERP? Have you seen one at
your workplace? If so, how did it function and suggest updates.
6. What is the difference between Analytics and Analysis?
7. What do you mean by chatbots? Suggest some use cases for them?
8. How has AI disrupted the Ed-tech space? And what about the medical
field?
9. What is a Management Information System?
10. What is a NO CODE system? Advantages and disadvantages?
11. What are the various aspects behind choosing the right ERP system?
12. Explain Systems of Differentiation and Systems of Records. How do
you think they are related to each other?
13. Name some common systems used for ERP, HRMS, CRM etc.
14. What are the recent trends in the Ed-tech and Fintech domains?
15. Do you know about Oracle and Hana? Where do you think they
differ?
16. What do you think are some ethical concerns around data sharing,
privacy, user-data confidentiality etc. and how do you think they can
be addressed?
Consulting & Strategy- Key terms
1. SWOT Analysis
2. Sweet Spot
3. Porter’s Five Forces
4. Strategy and what all it comprises
5. McKinsey’s 7S Framework
6. Value Chain Analysis
7. BCG Matrix
8. PESTEL Analysis
9. Profit versus profitability
10. Growth and what it entails (CAGR for example)
11. Tetra threat Framework
12. Competitive Advantage
13. Mergers and Acquisitions
14. 5000-mile view versus Bird’s eye view
15. Factors to consider for global expansion of a firm
16. Components of Industry Analysis
17. Forward and Backward Vertical Integration
18. Change Management Plan
19. Domain Study
20. SMART process
21. Strategic Thinking, Systems Thinking, Design Thinking
22. Product life-cycle
23. Learning curve
24. Spillover Effect
25. Consulting Phases
26. Blue-Ocean Strategy
27. Value Proposition
28. Decnetralisation
29. Domino Effect
30. Red Queen Effect
Economics- Key terms
1. Microeconomics
2. GDP versus GNP
3. Depreciation
4. Inflation versus Deflation
5. Monetary Policy and its instruments
6. Fiscal Policy
7. Securities (Equity, Debt & Hybrid)
8. Bear Market
9. Bull Market
10. Business Cycle
11. Law of Supply & Demand
12. Opportunity cost
13. Commodity
14. Sunk Cost
15. SEBI, RBI and other important regulatory bodies
16. IMF, NATO, World Bank, WTO-GATS
17. LAF
18. Price Ceilings and Price Floors
19. Capitalism versus Socialism versus Communism
20. Perfect Competition versus Monopoly versus Monopolistic Competition
21. Depression versus Recession
22. Balance of Payments
23. Exchange Rate Systems
24. India’s current economic statistics and their implication
25. Purchasing Power Parity
26. Real versus Nominal
27. Arbitrage
28. Bills versus Bonds
29. Market Economies
30. Upturns and downturns
Quantitative Methods- Key terms
1. Measures of Central Tendency
2. Quantitative and Qualitative data
3. Population versus Sample
4. Parameter
5. Variable versus constant
6. Bell Curve
7. Types of Distribution
8. Regression
9. Hypothesis
10. Type 1 and Type 2 Errors
11. Variance, Covariance and correlation
12. Independent versus Dependent variables
13. Use of quantitative research methods in business contexts
14. Standard deviation and standard error
15. Skewed data
16. Probability
17. Continuous versus discrete data
18. Probability
19. Modulus
20. Statistic
Recent developments and their relevance in the
business world
1. Air India and Indigo’s mega deals
2. Impact of COVID on various sectors
3. G20 and what it means for India
4. Business Implications of the Russia-Ukraine War, Israel-Palestine War
5. India as an emerging global economy
6. Rise of AI
7. Rise of hybrid businesses and practises such as moonlighting
8. Gig Economy
9. India versus Maldives
10. Unicorn boom in India
11. Sri-Lanka crisis
12. Truck economy and truckers’ strike in India
13. Agnipath Scheme
14. The Great Resignation
15. Mass hiring and rapid firing by global tech giants
16. CSRs of businesses
17. Upcoming elections in India and what it entails for the economy
18. Expectations from the Union Budget 2024, and what is an Interim
budget
19. Rise of the Indian Diaspora around the world
20. “Airbus partners with CSIR to help green fuel development in India”
21. Recent infrastructure developments (like Vande Bharat train routes,
MTHL etc.) and their economic implications
22. Digitisation initiatives like- UPI, ONDC, FASTag, Bharat-Net etc.
23. Economic outlook for India for 2024
24. WEF 2024
25. Some of the most pressing resource scarcities and how can they be
addressed