Tell me about a time you made a mistake. How did you handle it, and what did you learn?
Why This Is Asked
PwC wants team members who take ownership, are honest, and learn from errors. In audit and consulting, mistakes can affect client trust; how you recover matters.
General Approach
Clearly state the mistake, your immediate corrective action, how you communicated it, and the long-term change you made to prevent recurrence. Show humility and a growth mindset.
Sample STAR Answer▾
Situation
As a research assistant in my university, I was encoding survey responses from 50 respondents into an Excel spreadsheet for a faculty project. Due to fatigue, I swapped the columns for two variables, so all corresponding data points were misaligned.
Task
I needed to correct the error before my professor used the data for analysis and before the draft report was due in three days; the integrity of the entire dataset depended on it.
Action
I immediately informed my professor about the mix-up, took full responsibility, and asked for permission to re-encode the entire dataset over the weekend. I cross-referenced every entry against the original paper surveys and added a formula-based check to flag inconsistencies going forward. I also volunteered to draft a data-entry protocol document to prevent future errors.
Result
The corrected dataset was delivered a day before the deadline, and the final analysis yielded consistent findings. My professor appreciated my transparency, and the new protocol reduced encoding errors in subsequent projects by 70%. I later received a commendation for my integrity.
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- •STAR Structure
- •Specificity & Numbers
- •Ownership Language
- •PH Workplace Context
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