Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination - Purpose

Purpose

After sitting the HKCEE and having their examination results announced, candidates may apply for a place in Form 6 amongst local schools in Hong Kong. Moreover, to qualify for the Hong Kong Advanced Level Examination (HKALE), students must pass certain requirements of HKCEE as a prerequisite. The Joint University Programmes Admissions System (JUPAS), including the EAS system under JUPAS, also consider students' HKCEE results as a requirement, and as a decisive factor of admission in the admission processes. Thus, students' results in HKCEE not only affect their application to Form 6; they also directly affect the chance of entering the universities after Form 7, which is commonly ignored by students until they have entered Form 6. In JUPAS, most admissions programs give HKCEE results about a 10–30% weighting, and some as much as 50%; the HKALE results provide the other 50%. Thus, HKCEE is currently the initial stage of University Entrance Examination nowadays.

The HKCEE is fully recognized by other countries including New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the U.S. and many major countries around the world. The level of HKCEE is equivalent to that of Year 11 in Australia and Year 11 in the UK. For comparison, the Mathematics syllabus of HKCEE is equivalent to New Zealand's NCEA Level 2 Mathematics at Form 6 (Year 12) level (excluding Calculus) rather than NCEA Level 1 or its predecessor the School Certificate examination sat by the country's Form 5 (Year 11) students.

Additional Mathematics in the HKCEE is on balance academically more advanced than NCEA Level 3 Mathematics with Calculus, sat by Form 7 (Year 13) students in New Zealand to gain university entrance in science and engineering. HKCEE's Additional Mathematics is also recognized by most of the programs in Hong Kong's universities as equivalent to HKALE Pure Mathematics.

For the examination questions on the same topics, those in HKCEE tend to be loaded with unclear wordings and difficult manipulations compared with their NCEA counterparts.

In other subjects, such as the sciences like Chemistry, Physics, the syllabi covered in HKCEE are similar to that of the SAT Subject Tests sat in Grade 12, but it is arguably easier to obtain a score of 760 on the SAT Subject Tests than to obtain a grade of A in the HKCEE examination despite the fact that Grade 12 is theoretically equivalent to Form 6 under the Hong Kong school system.