‘Feels like magic’ as ‘nightmare’ over: Hong Kong’s DSE stars revel in results – as it happened
One cross-border student, who is among top scorers, says she was ‘really excited’ to find out results after worrying about ‘relatively hard’ exams
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Students across Hong Kong learned their results on Wednesday for the city’s university entrance exams.
Both parents and their children were hoping for the best as they found out scores for the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE), which grades most subjects on a seven-level scale from 1 to 5**.
This year, 55,489 candidates signed up for the exams, a 10 per cent increase from the 50,591 last year.
Most of them, or 45,328, were school candidates. The figure marked a 5 per cent increase from the 43,160 who signed up for the exams last year.
The other 10,161 students were private candidates, up 37 per cent from the 7,431 in the last edition, partly due to the increased number of takers living in mainland China.
Students who achieve level 5 in a subject are graded as 5, 5* or 5**. Level 5** is awarded to the highest-scoring 10 per cent of candidates, with 5* allocated to the next 30 per cent and 5 for the rest.
There are a total of 16 top scorers from 14 schools this year, with a male student achieving the highest results among the batch after securing 5** for four electives, three core subjects and the extended maths module, in addition to an attained grade in citizenship and social development.
Ten male and five female students scored a perfect 5** across six subjects this year, with an “attained” result in citizenship and social development and 10 of them were “super top scorers”, as they also earned a 5** for the extended elective maths module.
Reporting by William Yiu, Emily Tsang, Leopold Chen, Lynn Zhang, Lorraine Chiang, Kathryn Giordano, Timon Johnson, Yohji Lam, Ellie Yau, Hannah Wang, Connie Wong and Nora Mankel
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