Can you use a calculator in HKSI Paper 1?

Here is the honest position. We do not have a verified answer to this question, and we are not going to guess at an examination room rule you could be turned away over.

What we can do is tell you exactly where the answer lives, and explain why it matters far less than the question implies.

Where to get the real answer

Two places, both authoritative and both free. The HKSI examination handbook sets out the rules for the sitting, including what you may bring into the room. Your enrolment confirmation and the exam centre information HKSI sends you will also state the current requirements.

Read them the week you enrol, not the night before. Permitted-item rules are the sort of thing that changes quietly and is enforced strictly.

Why the answer probably does not matter to you

Paper 1 is Fundamentals of Securities and Futures Regulation. It is a law and codes paper. The nine topics run through the Ordinance, licensing and registration, client assets, business conduct, the exchanges, listings and market misconduct, and none of that is quantitative in any meaningful sense.

There is arithmetic at the edges. Capital requirements and client money rules involve thresholds and calculations in principle, and a question could ask you to recognise whether something meets a requirement. Those are comparisons rather than computations. If you find yourself wishing for a calculator during a Paper 1 mock, the more likely problem is that you do not know the rule.

What is definitely not allowed

The paper is closed book. That much is published and unambiguous: no manual, no notes, no printed copy of the Ordinance, no phone.

Candidates who have sat open-book professional exams elsewhere sometimes plan their revision around lookup rather than recall, and Paper 1 punishes that immediately. Everything you use has to be in your head, which is the whole reason the 70% pass mark bites the way it does.

The wider point about unverified rules

You will find confident answers to this question on forums. Some of them will be right. None of them are the current handbook, and an out-of-date forum answer about permitted items is exactly the kind of thing that costs someone a sitting fee.

Our position, stated plainly: we would rather publish a page that says we do not know than a page that guesses well. This is a licensing exam. A wrong administrative detail here costs you HKD 1,800 and a month, and there is no version of that trade we are willing to make for a bit of extra traffic.

The concession is that this makes for an unsatisfying page, and we know it. If you want the things about exam day we can verify, what to expect on exam day and whether Paper 1 is open book cover the ground we are confident about.