The Southeast Asian nation becomes the second country to adopt TOPIK results for higher education enrollment after Hong Kong in 2025, South Korea's Ministry of Education said Tuesday.
Students who score at least Level 3 on TOPIK will be exempted from the foreign language section of Vietnam's national high school graduation examination, with their converted scores applied directly to university applications.
Vietnam has progressively integrated Korean into its formal education system, designating it as a second foreign language in 2020 before elevating it to a first foreign language and graduation exam subject in 2021.
The country ranked as the largest source of overseas TOPIK applicants last year, with 85,896 Vietnamese candidates accounting for 15.2 percent of the 566,665 total registrants worldwide. Vietnam also sent the second-highest number of international students to South Korea in 2025 at about 75,144, trailing only China by some 1,000 students.
The surge in Korean language study is closely tied to employment prospects. South Korean corporate investment — firms including Hyundai Motor Company and POSCO — in Vietnam has created sustained demand for Korean-speaking workers in interpretation, sales, quality control, procurement and labor management roles.
The broader appeal of Korean content has propelled the language to the world's sixth most-studied, behind English, Spanish, French, Japanese and German, according to language learning platform Duolingo.
Korean is now taught in formal primary and secondary school curricula across 47 countries, with 24 nations designating it as a second foreign language and 11 incorporating it into university entrance requirements.
"The adoption of TOPIK for university admissions abroad signifies the elevated status of the Korean language and the growing credibility of the test," Education Minister Choi Gyo-jin said.
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