was that it might be "pedagogically unsound" and would encourage "rote memorisation" behaviour from students. Nevertheless, students were often able to obtain these "restricted documents" by taking classes at cram schools. Hence, the policy of the HKEAA indirectly denied less privileged students from gaining access to information pertaining to how examination papers are scored. This might have created a socio-economic bias in the ability of students to obtain good results in the HKCEE. Moreover, according to media reports, some so-called "star tutors" managed to earn more than HK$7 million per annum (~US$900,000), leading some to speculate that the HKEAA's policy had indirectly transferred large amounts of wealth to these cram schools. To deal with this problem, the HKEAA started to release the marking schemes together with the year's examination papers in 2003. HKSAR Government Scholarship The HKSAR Government Scholarship is a prestigious award associated with the HKCEE Examination. The top 30–40 candidates in the HKCEE Examination receive this scholarship each year. Counterintuitively, many 10A students fail to receive this award. This apparent paradox is mainly due to the methodology in which the HKSAR Government Scholarship is awarded. Rather than calculating the number of A's each student has, the HKSAR Government Scholarship is awarded on the basis of the highest total in raw scores attained in the seven best subjects of each student. Consequently, many 9A, 8A, and even 7A students go on to win this award while 10A students do not. This has been a major source of complaint from parents of 10A students who felt cheated from this coveted prize. Early Admissions Scheme The Early Admissions Scheme (or simply "EAS"), a subsystem of the Joint University Programmes Admissions System (JUPAS) since 2003, allowed school Candidates with 6 or more "A"s (Distinctions) on their first attempt of the HKCEE, with level 4 or above in English Language, and also level 4 or above in Chinese Language or "C" or above in French or Putonghua to apply for the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, or the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology institutions after their Secondary 6 study, without the need to sit for the HKALE. Each year about 400–600 students entered the scheme via this subsystem in JUPAS. A selection procedure exists in this scheme but, unlike the mainstream scheme of JUPAS, the students are guaranteed a firm offer in EAS regardless of the number