In short
If you want to start a bachelor’s degree in Germany with Vietnamese certificates and do not yet have a university degree, you have to take the TestAS in the APS procedure. Source: testas.de: the TestAS in China, Vietnam and India.
What is the APS?
The Academic Evaluation Centre (APS, Akademische Prüfstelle) is part of the German Embassy in Hanoi. It checks Vietnamese certificates before you apply to a German university or apply for a visa.
Who has to take the TestAS?
According to the information sheet of the German Embassy on the APS standard procedure for undergraduate studies:
- School leavers after 12 school years with a passed state school-leaving exam in Vietnam are affected.
- Students without a degree from a Vietnamese university are also affected.
- Since 15 March 2023, the procedure includes the check of the documents and the TestAS.
Sources: Federal Foreign Office: information sheet APS standard procedure (in German), Federal Foreign Office: APS in Vietnam (in German).
Exceptions
- Artistic degree programmes: For purely artistic degree programmes there is a simplified procedure without the TestAS (Federal Foreign Office: information sheet artistic degree programmes, in German).
- Qualifications from other countries: If you do not have Vietnamese certificates, you apply directly to the university without an APS check.
What we do not know for sure (open)
- Whether there is a minimum result in the TestAS. The sources we could read name none.
- Which Subject Module is required in the APS procedure, or whether you choose it freely.
- How registration for the TestAS relates to the APS application.
- The embassy’s pages could not be reached when we retrieved them on 30 October 2026. The information above comes from a web search on the same day. According to the page data, it is about two years old.
Please check these points directly with the APS Hanoi before you register.
How to prepare
In the APS procedure, the TestAS is mandatory, but there is no pass mark. What matters is that you know the format and divide your time well. An overview: Structure of the digital TestAS and Core Module. The test is available in German and English. For medicine, admission to the university comes on top; the guide Medicine with a foreign Abitur (in German) explains the rules for this.