The Review 2015

3 The Review 2015 Message from the President and Vice-Chancellor HKU' s Y ear in t he S potlight The University has had an extraordinary year of both exciting achievement and intense public and media interest at home and abroad. We have continued to receive welcome recognition of the excellence of our academic work. Outstanding students from Hong Kong, the region and the world voted with their feet and continued to come to HKU. We were the largest recipient of government research funding for the 14 th straight year. We continued to attract world- leading institutions as partners, such as the Karolinska Institutet. We attracted more than 1,200 leading and aspiring entrepreneurs to the launch of our DreamCatchers initiative to drive innovation at HKU. All of this speaks volumes of the hard work and high calibre of our staff and students, and the strength of our collective commitment to being a world-class university. Our biggest challenge has become one that many other institutions would relish: how do we make a great university even greater? HKU has outstanding people, resources, facilities and capabilities, but there is always room to improve, particularly if we keep raising the bar higher. In 2014–15, we started to solidify our goals for the future and to conceive where that bar should be. Teaching and Learning One major vote of confidence in the University in 2015 came from the very high quality of undergraduate applicants to HKU. The admissions results were spectacular. Some 58 per cent of the 689 students in the top-scoring category for the Hong Kong DSE chose to come here, including all 12 students who achieved perfect scores, 82 per cent of those who wanted to study medicine and an incredible 98 per cent (102/104) of those who wanted to study law. We also attracted the top scorers ( zhuang-yuan ) of cities, counties and provinces in Mainland China, and top scorers in other systems, such as the IB and A-levels. The fierce competition to attend HKU is a clear signal that we are developing a global reputation for the high quality of our educational offerings. There is no room for complacency, however. In late 2015 we underwent an inspection by the Quality Assurance Council, which provided us with a timely opportunity to look long and hard at our teaching, assessment and quality improvement processes. We are doing many interesting things of which we can be proud, but of course, we want to do better. Our Academic Development Plan for the 2016–19 triennium aims to capitalise on our strengths and take us to new heights. One bold goal is to ensure every student has the opportunity for a learning experience in both Mainland China and overseas by 2022 (building from 50 per cent by 2019). The future of our graduates, and indeed Hong Kong, will depend in part on their ability to engage with people across cultures and countries, and we view it as our responsibility to prepare them for that.