as a prerequisite. The Joint University Programmes Admissions System (JUPAS), including the EAS system under JUPAS, also considered students' HKCEE results as a requirement and as a decisive factor of admission in the admission processes. Thus, students' results in HKCEE affected their application to sixth form but also directly affected the chance of entering the universities after seventh form, which was commonly ignored by students until they entered sixth form. In JUPAS, most admissions programs gave HKCEE results about a 10–30% weight, and some as much as 50%; the HKALE results provided the other 50%. Thus, HKCEE was the initial stage of University Entrance Examination. The HKCEE was fully recognised by other countries including New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and many other major countries. It was equivalent to Year 11 in Australia and in the UK. For comparison, the Mathematics syllabus of HKCEE was equivalent to New Zealand's National Certificate of Educational Achievement 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 was 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 was also recognised 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 tended to be loaded with unclear wordings and difficult manipulations, compared with their NCEA counterparts. In other subjects, such as the sciences like Chemistry and Physics, the syllabus covered in HKCEE was similar to that of the SAT Subject Tests sat in Grade 12, but it was arguably easier to obtain a score of 760 on the SAT Subject Tests than to obtain a grade of A in the HKCEE examination although Grade 12 was theoretically equivalent to Form 6 under the Hong Kong school system. Grading and UK equivalence The results of the HKCEE are expressed in terms of seven grades A – U (or 5*-1 and U for Chinese and English) other than French. In the past, there were two other grades below UNCL: G and H. They were called "Grenade" and "Ladder". Results below grade 'F' are designated as unclassified ("UNCL"), assigned either when candidates