A different examination is taken for each area of study, but school students are usually obliged to take examinations for certain "core subjects" (English language, English literature, mathematics, and science) along with several optional subjects; sometimes up to 10-14 in total.
It was introduced in 1988, and replaced both the O-level GCE (Ordinary level General Certificate of Education) and the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) qualifications.
GCSE (global common subexpression elimination[?]) is an optimisation technique used by some compilers - e.g., gcc implements it.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump