Is there negative marking on HKSI Paper 1? What we can and cannot tell you

The question behind the question is always the same: should I guess? Yes. Almost certainly yes, and possibly yes regardless of the marking scheme. But the reasoning is worth setting out properly, because it is one of the few places where exam technique is a matter of arithmetic rather than opinion.

What the marking scheme definitely is

The pass standard is expressed as a count: 42 correct out of 60. That phrasing is the most useful thing we have. A standard written as a number of correct answers is the language of a scheme that adds up correct answers.

What we will not claim

That there is definitively no negative marking. We have not found a published rule imposing one, and we are not going to convert an absence of evidence into a statement of fact on a page that candidates will plan around.

Why you should answer everything anyway

Run the two cases.

Only one row of that table favours a blank, it requires a marking rule we have no evidence for, and it requires you to have learned nothing at all about the question. If you have read the stem and eliminated even one option, guessing wins under any plausible scheme.

Here is the opinion. Candidates who leave questions blank do it out of a vague sense that a wrong answer is worse than no answer, which is a moral intuition rather than a mathematical one. It is not worse. On a paper where you need 42 of 60 and you can afford eighteen wrong, an unanswered question is simply a wrong answer you chose not to have a chance at.

No partial credit, and what follows

Multiple choice does not give half marks. A question where you knew everything except one threshold scores the same as a question you had never seen. That is harsh, and it shapes where your study time should go.

It argues against depth for its own sake. Knowing one topic to an extraordinary standard buys you no more per question than knowing it adequately, while a topic you skipped entirely costs you every question it generates. Breadth first, then depth on the areas the syllabus weights most heavily. The pass mark page works through what score to target as a result.

No per-topic hurdle

Worth restating because candidates keep assuming otherwise. There is one number, applied to the paper as a whole. You cannot fail Paper 1 on a single weak topic if your total clears 42. Nine topics feed into one score.

How many questions come from each topic is not published. Our estimate of the split is derived by scaling each topic's count of second-level syllabus headings to 60 questions, and it is an estimate rather than a fact about the paper. The syllabus overview sets it out with the same caveat attached.

The time-management consequence

If every question is worth the same and there is no partial credit, then the question you spend four minutes on is costing you the two you could have answered instead. That is the real marking-related risk on this paper, and it has nothing to do with penalties.

• Hit your pacing checkpoints: question 20 by 30 minutes, question 40 by 60 minutes
• Never spend more than about two minutes on any single question on the first pass
• Flag and return rather than grinding in sequence
• In the final minutes, fill every remaining blank before you review anything

What a machine-marked paper gets you

The concession, and it is a genuine advantage of this format. There is no marker having a bad afternoon, no handwriting to be misread, no benefit-of-the-doubt you might or might not receive. Sixty selections, one fixed standard, an identical process for every candidate in the room. Whatever else you think about multiple choice, the result you get is the result you earned, and after a fail that clarity is more useful than a sympathetic marker would have been.

For the shape of the questions themselves, and how the wrong options are constructed, see how Paper 1 questions are built.