A single class in Vietnam sends 8 students to China's top universities Tsinghua and Peking

Eight students in a single Chinese-language class at Hanoi's Foreign Language Specialized School have won places at Tsinghua University and Peking University.

Six are heading to Tsinghua and two to Peking, the school said on Sept. 10.

Peking and Tsinghua are China's highest-ranked universities, placing 14th and 17th respectively in this year's QS World University Rankings.

The class of 2023-2026 had 49 students, the largest in its grade at the school, which is run by the University of Languages and International Studies at Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

The school called the eight admissions a record for a single class in Vietnam, which typically sends 10 to 20 students a year to the two universities combined.

Sixteen other students in the class also won study-abroad scholarships, bringing the class total to 24 places in China, the U.S. and New Zealand.

Three received support packages worth around $304,000 from U.S. universities.

Students of the Chinese-language class of 2023-2026 with their teachers at the Foreign Language Specialized School in Hanoi. Photo courtesy of the school

Do Thi Ngoc Chi, a vice principal, credited the results to the school's emphasis on independent study, multidimensional thinking and adapting to change.

The class took 13 national-level prizes in Chinese over three years.

Students specialize in one language and take a second alongside it. Most finished with HSK 6, the top band of the six-level Chinese proficiency test, and many hold IELTS scores between 8 and 8.5.

Founded in 1969, the school is the only specialized high school in Vietnam teaching seven foreign languages: English, Russian, French, Chinese, German, Japanese and Korean.