hand in unanswered or unintelligible paper(s), or when candidates are assumed to have cheated. Candidates not taking the exam are designated as Absent ('ABS') for that subject. Before 2002 grades A – F were each divided into two "fine grades", making the original number of grades available twelve, from A(01) to F(12). The fine grades in both HKCEE and HKALE were lifted in 2002, as they were accused of being discriminatory to students. Most of the results are graded "on the curve" but at the same time a cutoff score for each grade is also used. Obtaining an A is very difficult, especially for languages in the past system, where only about 1.5–3% of students received A's. On average, only the top 3–4% in each subject can get an A. The cutoff scores vary greatly from subject to subject and from year to year. To give a clearer picture, for Chinese, A-grades are sometimes given for candidates having scored 70 or above, while for Mathematics, an A invariably translates to a score in excess of 90. The cutoff scores are not released by the HKEAA publicly; the information is only available to teachers. Official statistics can be found on the HKEAA website: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124073914/http://www.hkeaa.edu.hk/doc/fd/2004cee/39-60.pdf New grading system Since 2007, as a steppingstone towards the grading system HKDSE that will be introduced in 2010, a new grading system was introduced to the exams in the subjects of Chinese and English. Under the new system There are seven grades: five numerical grades from 1–5, where 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest, and two other grades, "5*" and "UNCL", for students with particularly outstanding and poor performance respectively. The traditional "on-the-curve" system was not used other than to distinguish between the 5*'s and the 5's. The point system was in chaos in its first year of implementation since level 2, which is the passing line in HKEAA, counts as two points in some schools and the HKEAA, but counts as one point in EMB and most schools. This counting process not only confused Form 5 students, but also some Form 6 students who repeated the exam to obtain better Language results for JUPAS admissions. The problems with the points system caused changes in the method for calculating points in HKEAA in the following years. Since the two syllabi in English were merged into one along with the new system, some schools