The Asian International School
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · PrivateKey facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
CIS · accreditationCollege Board · authorised programmeGroup of Asian International Education (GAIE) · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
It accredits international schools and is a paying association at the same time. It examines governance and ownership, the curriculum, teaching, student wellbeing, staff and premises; a team of volunteers from other CIS accredited schools visits the school. Membership and accreditation are different things here, and schools confuse them more often than anything else.
What the badge means for this school. The school has been through this organisation's accreditation. It was judged as a whole: governance, safeguarding, staff, premises, teaching. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →An American organisation that allows a school to put the letters AP on a pupil's transcript. The permission is granted course by course and tied to a particular teacher, it has to be renewed every year, and College Board reads the course syllabus before granting it.
What the badge means for this school. The school is allowed to run advanced AP courses - not the school as a whole, but one by one: by subject and by teacher. Governance, safeguarding and the primary years are not part of that check. Which subjects are actually approved is visible in the ledger. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →Advanced Placement: American advanced courses for the senior years. The exam for a course is set and marked by the College Board, not by the school. A good result is counted by American universities as a first-year course already passed, which saves a student time and money.
What this means for this school. A school does not get to call a course AP automatically: the College Board reads the course syllabus and approves it separately for every subject and every teacher, and the permission has to be renewed each year. Every approved school in the world is listed in the open AP Course Ledger, and this school's entry there stands as a line in the accreditation block above. How many courses a school is approved for, and in which subjects, the ledger does not show in its general listing. AP has no leaving certificate of its own: it sits on top of the school's main programme rather than being a separate system.
Group of Asian International Education, in Vietnamese Tập đoàn Giáo dục Quốc Tế Á Châu, is a grouping of its own institutions in Ho Chi Minh City: the school Trường Quốc tế Á Châu, also known as The Asian International School, with IPS at primary level and AHS at secondary and upper secondary level, The Institute of Asian Studies and The Saigon International University. The group has no site of its own; it tells about itself in sections on the sites of its institutions. The year of foundation is 1999. The group does not name an owner and does not separate ownership, management and franchise. The numbers differ between pages and between language versions, and we give them all: a page on the university site speaks of 15 campuses and some 82,000 students, the English page of the school of 16 campuses and more than 87,000 students, and the Vietnamese page of the school of 18 sites plus projects under construction in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang and of 90,660 students. Staff according to the English pages: more than 2,000 Vietnamese teachers and employees and 200 from abroad. The school part covers grades 1 to 12, the Vietnamese programme and the international one run in parallel, and the languages of instruction are English and Vietnamese.
What this means for this school. The network owns or operates the school. Its accreditation and programme authorisation the school obtains separately, in its own name.