What score do you need to pass HKSI Paper 1?

Forty-two. That is the number, out of 60, in 90 minutes.

It sounds like a detail and it is the most consequential fact about this exam, because a 70% threshold changes what adequate preparation looks like. Plenty of candidates prepare to a standard that would comfortably clear a 60% bar and then discover, once, expensively, what the extra ten points cost.

What 70% means in practice

It means you can afford to be wrong about roughly three questions in ten, across everything. That allowance sounds generous until you account for how it gets spent.

Add those up and the allowance is gone before you meet anything difficult. This is why breadth beats depth on Paper 1 - a topic you skipped cannot be offset by a topic you mastered, because there is no compensation and every question is worth the same.

What should you score in practice before sitting?

Higher than 42. Our rule of thumb is that you want to be hitting 45 or better on a timed mock you have not seen before, and hitting it more than once.

There are two reasons for the buffer. Practice questions you have worked through before flatter you - a familiar stem is answered from memory of the answer, not from knowledge of the topic. And exam conditions cost most people a few marks in ways that never show up at your kitchen table: a strange centre, a countdown clock, and the particular way anxiety makes you reread a question you understood the first time.

Does the pass mark ever move?

The published standard is 70%, and you should plan against that and nothing else. Speculation about scaling, adjusted thresholds or generous marking is common in candidate forums and none of it is published. Prepare for 42 of 60 as a hard line, because that is how it is stated.

For context on how demanding that is: the twelve-month mean pass rate to June 2026 was 51.9%, so roughly half the room clears the line. That is a low pass rate for an exam with no calculations in it, and the threshold is doing most of the work.

How marks are reported

Check the HKSI examination handbook for the current position on what your result notification shows and how quickly it arrives. We are not going to describe the result slip from memory - the procedural detail is exactly the sort of thing that changes between handbook versions, and getting it wrong on a page like this would be worse than saying nothing.

What we can say is that the pass mark itself is fixed and public. Everything you plan should key off 42.

A target that actually works

1. Aim to be above half on topic-level questions by the midpoint of your plan. Below that and you are behind, whatever the reading schedule says.
2. Take an unseen timed mock two weeks out. Not a familiar one. The number it gives you is only useful if the questions are new.
3. If you score below 42, do not book. If you score 42 to 45, repair your two weakest topics and mock again. Above 45 twice, sit it.
4. In the exam, answer every question. Flag and return rather than stalling, and spend the last two minutes filling in anything blank.

Our opinion: the 45 target is the most useful single piece of advice on this page, and candidates resist it because they treat 42 as the goal. Forty-two is where you stop failing, not where you start passing comfortably. Those are different places and only one of them survives a bad morning.

The concession: we cannot show you data linking mock scores to real outcomes, because none exists publicly - HKSI publishes pass rates and nothing about score distributions or candidate performance. The buffer is a judgement, based on how much familiar questions inflate practice scores. Treat it as a sensible margin rather than a calibrated one.