[1] The examination was conducted from March to May, and the results were routinely released in the first week of July (or late June).
AS-level was commonly known as Hong Kong Advanced Supplementary Level Examination (HKASLE), which was first held in 1994.
The same standards were applied in both marking and grading; the instruction medium is not recorded on the results notices nor certificates.
It was well-criticized that AL subjects demand substantial memorization and clarification of difficult concepts such as Chinese History, Biology, and Economics which have their syllabus partly equivalent to first-year undergraduate courses in terms of the length and depth.
Actually, it was thought that the examinations were intentionally designed to be difficult by stakeholders for different reasons such as UK-imposed elitism as well as limited university seats dated back to 1992.
However, such world-class exams do lead to the births of different famous local professors, resulting in the golden era of higher education in Hong Kong since the 2010s.
With the introduction of the Early Admissions Scheme in 2001, top scorers in HKCEE could skip the HKALE and enter universities directly after Form 6.
Therefore, the HKALE in 2002 was the last one which all HKCEE top scorers needed to take for university admission in Hong Kong.
The former originally led to a three-year course in the University of Hong Kong (HKU) at the end of Form Seven (Upper Six), mainly for students in English-medium schools.
Through considerable debates (Tang and Bray, 2000), programmes in CUHK switched to three-year systems as those launched in HKU in 1991.
Consequently, the Hong Kong Higher Level Examination was abolished and was finally merged with today's HKALE.
Advanced Supplementary Level subjects were also implemented at the same time to cater for different needs of candidates (Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority, 2003, p. 4).
The HKDSE equivalent grades were arrived at by deduction, as the entrance requirements for universities and government positions in Hong Kong officially aligned 3 as an E in the corresponding HKALE subjects [1].
The AS-level examination, which is commonly taken with the A-Levels, tests the ability of students to understand and use English at a level that is required for tertiary education.
There are five sections in the UE Examination: A pass in the UE was considered essential to being accepted to any degree program under the Joint University Programmes Admissions System, but some universities accepted a band 6 in IELTS or similar as an alternative of HKALE English pass.
A survey was conducted to equate the results with the International English Language Testing System by the HKEAA.
Introduced in the 1994 HKALE, the examination had tests in the following: Like Use of English, as a required-pass subject for degrees in JUPAS, almost all of the students sat it.
[5] Also, it was pointed out that introvert students suffered great disadvantage in the speaking test, as their performance was affected by their personality and did not reflect their language ability.
The new format also demanded candidates to have a high proficiency in comprehension and understanding of rhetoric or euphemism words and phrases.
Furthermore, a wide-ranging reading habit was always appreciated: The test lasted approximately 45 minutes and was allocated 15% of the total subject mark.
The Putonghua students were assigned to designated examination venues, which provided CD tapes separately, with contents the same as those of Cantonese.
Candidates were often required to analyse the implied meaning of a given speech during the course of listening, like the attitude of a speaker.
In the Listening exam of 2007, there was a part asking students to determine whether marked sentences were correct or not, based on the whole recording.
They said that all questions were compulsory so there should not be any advantage to those who left some of the blanks empty by deducting marks for wrong answers.
1996 – 2007 HKALE Statistics of candidates' results in Use of English 1996 – 2008 HKALE Statistics of candidates' results in Physics (AS-level) The Education Bureau of Hong Kong announced that in 2009, the new schooling structure, under which all students receive 12 years of pre-university education, would be implemented.