Vietnam grade
to Japan
Vietnam → Japan
Converting Vietnam grades for study in Japan
Japan is the country where the honest answer is that the conversion largely does not happen. There is no Japanese equivalent of WES or IQAS publishing country grade tables. Undergraduate selection runs on an entrance examination rather than on your school transcript. And the only Vietnam-specific figure any Japanese government body publishes comes not from Tokyo but from the Japanese Embassy in Hanoi. Each of those is worth knowing before you convert anything.
The one Vietnam-specific number: 7.5 out of 10
The Japanese Embassy in Vietnam publishes its own MEXT scholarship guidance in Vietnamese, and it states the academic requirement on Vietnam’s own scale — something MEXT’s central documents never do:
“Kết quả học tập tất cả các năm ở bậc đại học hoặc sau đại học cần đạt điểm trung bình tương đương 7.5 (theo thang điểm 10), tương đương 3.0 (theo thang điểm 4).”
Academic results for all years of undergraduate or graduate study must reach an average equivalent to 7.5 on the 10-point scale, equivalent to 3.0 on the 4-point scale. — 2027 MEXT Research Students guidance, Embassy of Japan in Vietnam. Deadline 29 May 2026.
Two things follow. Read against Circular 08/2021 Article 10 §5, a 10-point average of 7.5 sits inside Khá (7.00–7.99) — so the MEXT bar is a Khá degree. And the embassy treats 7.5/10 as equal to 3.0/4.0, which is a straight three-quarters of each scale.
Note also what this figure is not reconciled with. MEXT’s own Grade Conversion Chart converts an applicant’s grades to a 3-point grade-point scale (3 / 2 / 1 / 0), not a 4-point one, and the University Recommendation guidelines set the floor at “a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 2.30 or above” on that 3-point scale. The Embassy Recommendation guidelines set no numeric threshold at all, requiring only that achievement “equaled to or exceeded a certain level”. Three different Japanese government documents, three different scales, and none of them maps a Vietnamese mark into another. The embassy’s 7.5 is the one written for you.
Undergraduate: your school marks are barely converted at all
This is the structural fact that makes Japan different from Canada or Korea. For international undergraduate admission, Japanese universities select on the EJU — the Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Students, run by JASSO — together with their own entrance exam. 946 institutions use it, including 77 national universities.
Your Vietnamese transcript establishes eligibility — that you completed twelve years of schooling — and then the EJU score decides the outcome. The marks themselves are not converted into a Japanese GPA. Published cut-offs are stated in EJU points, not in grades:
| University / faculty | EJU Japanese | EJU subjects |
|---|---|---|
| Nagoya — Medicine | 420 | 380 |
| Hokkaido — Medicine | 385 | 340 |
| Tohoku — Letters | 380 | 290 |
| Hokkaido — Dental | 360 | 300 |
| Kyushu — Medicine | 350 | 360 |
| Nagoya — Letters | 220 | 265 |
Minimum EJU scores as published by each university for privately-financed international applicants. Requirements change yearly — check the current 私費外国人留学生入試要項.
JASSO is explicit that this is not universal: “there are certain universities (undergraduate programs), graduate schools and junior colleges that do not use EJU… It is important, therefore, for you to directly contact the universities you wish to attend” (EJU FAQ). Keio requires the EJU but sets no cut-off score at all.
Where Japan does publish country thresholds, Vietnam is missing
The University of Tokyo’s English-taught PEAK programme publishes national-qualification thresholds for fourteen countries — Australia “ATAR score of 98 or above”, France “overall score of at least 16 out of 20”, Germany “total mark of 1.4 or better”, the Netherlands “overall average of at least 8”, the UK “at least 3 grades of A or above at A level”, plus Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Poland, Korea and Singapore.
Vietnam is not on the list, and neither is it on the equivalent list in Kyoto’s iUP programme guidelines. PEAK’s fallback is explicit: applicants using a qualification not listed “must contact the PEAK Undergraduate Admissions Office by the end of August”, with no guarantee it will be accepted. If you are applying to an English-taught undergraduate programme with a Vietnamese qualification, that email is a step in the process, not a formality.
Japan has no WES
NIC-Japan, run by NIAD-QE, is Japan’s official recognition centre under the UNESCO Tokyo Convention. Its Vietnam page is a page of links — to MOET, to VN-NARIC, to other information centres. It publishes no Vietnamese grading scale, no conversion table and no equivalence statement. JASSO publishes no country grade tables either.
What happens instead is institutional assessment: applicants who completed twelve years of schooling abroad “are treated equally”, and beyond that “there are also cases in which each institution accepts applicants based on its own admission qualification assessment” — 個別入学資格審査, a documentary equivalence check rather than a grade computation.
Why a Vietnamese 4-point GPA does not transfer
If you are tempted to write your Vietnamese 4-point CGPA straight onto a Japanese form, look at what Japanese universities actually run. Four of these use a 4.3 maximum, and the University of Tokyo has no university-wide GPA at all:
| University | Scale | Top grade | Pass mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kyoto | 4.3 | A+ = 4.3 (96–100) | 60 (D) |
| Nagoya | 4.3 | A+ = 4.3 (95+) | 60 (C−) |
| Hokkaido | 4.3 | A+ = 4.3, 11 grades | C = 2.0 |
| Tsukuba | 4.3 | A+ = 4.3 (90+) | 60 (C) |
| Osaka | 4.0 | A+ = 4.0 (90–100) | 60 (C−) |
| Tohoku | 4.0 | AA = 4.0 (90–100) | 60 (C) |
| Kyushu | 4.0 | S = 4 (90+) | 60 (C) |
| Waseda | 4.0 | A+ = 4 (90–100) | 60 (C) |
| Keio | 4.0 | S = 4.0 | C |
| Tokyo | no GPA | 優上 (90+) | 可 (50) |
Two consequences. A 4.0 written against a 4.3 maximum understates you by roughly seven per cent before anyone reads it. And Japan’s pass mark is 60 almost everywhere, whereas Circular 08/2021 makes 4.0 a D and a pass in Vietnam — so the bottom of the two scales does not line up either. Give the grading scale, not just the number: Ritsumeikan APU, for one, requires transcripts to carry “information about the grading scale (maximum grade) and method of evaluation”.
One Vietnam-specific requirement that is not about grades
Since 1 March 2019, Vietnamese nationals applying for a Japanese student visa to attend a Japanese-language institution have needed their high school diploma authenticated by VN-NARIC — reported by NIAD-QE as taking about 20 days and costing 350,000 VND. It applies to the language-school route rather than to degree programmes, and visa rules change; confirm the current requirement with the embassy before you plan around it.
Sources
The documents this page rests on. Every one was read in full unless noted.
- Embassy of Japan in Vietnam — 2027 MEXT Research Students guidance (PDF) — the only Vietnam-specific figure any Japanese body publishes: an average equivalent to 7.5 on the 10-point scale, 3.0 on the 4-point. Verified directly.
- MEXT — 2027 Research Students application guidelines (PDF) — the Embassy Recommendation track, which sets no numeric threshold at all.
- MEXT — University Recommendation guidelines (PDF) — the GPA floor of 2.30, on MEXT’s 3-point scale.
- MEXT Grade Conversion Chart (PDF, via University of Tsukuba) — establishes that MEXT converts to a 3-point scale and that no Type covers a 0–10 scale. The chart’s own rows are described but not reproduced: three extractions disagreed on the column alignment.
- JASSO — about the EJU — what the examination is, and the 946 institutions that use it.
- University of Tokyo PEAK — 2026 application guidelines (PDF) — the national-qualification thresholds for fourteen countries, with Vietnam absent and the “contact us by the end of August” fallback.
- NIC-Japan (NIAD-QE) — Viet Nam — Japan’s official recognition centre under the Tokyo Convention. A page of links, with no grading scale and no equivalence. Verified directly.
The EJU cut-offs and the GPA scales for the ten universities are linked inline beside each figure.
Every figure on this page was read from a Japanese government body or a Japanese university’s own site, linked above. Where nothing is published, we say so rather than filling the gap from a converter. Scholarship rules and entrance requirements change every year.
Admission to a Japanese university is decided by that university. The figures on your official Vietnamese transcript are always the authoritative ones.
Is it competitive?
Most Japan master's programmes look for the equivalent of a US 3.0+ (an upper-second / good average), with competitive and funded programmes wanting more. Convert first, then check each programme's stated minimum. For a credit-weighted multi-course result, use the WES iGPA calculator.
Which Vietnamese rules apply to your transcript depends on when you enrolled. MOET Circular 08/2021 took effect on 3 May 2021 and applies to intakes admitted after that date; earlier intakes fall under the superseded regulations. Institutions on the year-based (niên chế) system do not calculate a 4-point GPA at all. See how Vietnamese grading works before relying on any conversion — and note that a widely-circulated conversion table converts the wrong thing, giving a different grade for most marks.