Is HKSI Paper 1 multiple choice?

Yes, all of it. Sixty items, four options each, click and move on.

Candidates hear multiple choice and relax slightly. Then roughly half of them fail, which suggests the relaxation is misplaced.

What does a Paper 1 question look like?

Usually a short scenario followed by four options, where the work is deciding which rule, regime or obligation applies. Some items are straight recall of a definition. Others give you a situation and ask what the intermediary must do.

Note what that item is doing. Every wrong option is a genuine source of law, so you cannot eliminate on plausibility. You either know where client money lives or you are guessing between two reasonable answers.

Why multiple choice is harder here than it sounds

Three reasons, and the third is the one that gets people.

The pass mark is 70%, so partial knowledge across nine topics does not add up to a pass. The pace is 1.5 minutes an item, so there is no time to reason your way from first principles. And the distractors are built from adjacent real rules rather than from nonsense, which means the format rewards precision and gives almost no credit for general familiarity.

Written exams let you show partial understanding. This one does not. You are right or you are not.

Does the format change how you should study?

Completely. Reading produces the fuzzy recognition that multiple choice is specifically designed to defeat, which is why candidates who have read the manual twice still score in the fifties.

Practice by answering rather than by reviewing. Force yourself to commit to an option before you look, and when you get one wrong, work out which adjacent rule you confused it with rather than just noting the letter. How Paper 1 questions are built goes through the construction properly, and distractor patterns covers the traps.

The one advantage the format gives you

The answer is always on the screen. That sounds trivial and it is not: it means well-drilled elimination genuinely works, and a candidate who knows two of the four options are wrong is in a far better position than the same candidate would be facing a blank page.

Our view: the multiple-choice format is the single most under-exploited part of Paper 1. Most candidates prepare content and never practice the technique of reading four options for the difference between them, which is a separate skill that improves quickly and costs you nothing to learn.

The concession: technique has a ceiling. If you do not know Topic 3, no amount of elimination will carry you across a 70% line, and anyone selling you exam tricks as a substitute for the syllabus is selling you a resit.