- Curriculum Development
The Sino-US Integrated Curriculum integrates courses at 4 levels: Regular Courses, Honors Courses, AP Courses, and POST AP courses.
Regular courses consist of Chinese national curriculum courses, including and in addition to Chinese, Mathematics, English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Politics, History, Geography, Computer Science, Art, PE, College Counseling, etc.
In addition to its English courses, VMA provides other language courses, such as German, Spanish, etc.
On top of that, VMA also provides the more challenging honors courses to students who exhibit strong learning capabilities. RegularCourses and Honors Courses each lay a solid foundation for AP courses.
AP courses (Advanced Placement Program®) are courses of university-level difficulty provided in high schools authorized to deliver them by The College Board. Attending AP courses and passing AP exams can not only evince a student’s academic performance, but also provide two further advantages: firstly, it will make the student more competitive when applying for university; secondly, if the score of the AP exam meets requirement set by a university, requirements for related coursework credits at that university can be waived.
VMA currently offers 25 AP courses including AP English Literature & Writing, AP Calculus, AP Statistics, AP Physics, AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP Microeconomics, AP Macroeconomics, AP Psychology, AP 2D Art, AP 3D Art, and more. In addition, VMA has introduced AP Capstone courses to provide platforms for students to conduct interdisciplinary academic research.
To build upon its AP courses, VMA also offers Post AP Courses, which provide more and broader learning opportunities for talented students. Currently Post AP Courses include Introduction to Nuclear Chemistry, Introduction to Ordinary Differential Equations, Introduction to Multivariable Analysis, Introduction to Statistical Data Science, Astronomy, Adventure Literature, Literature and Music, Asian Literature, and more.
- Exams and Competitions
Since November 2019, VMA has been cooperating with The American College Test and becomes the first ACT Curriculum and Testing center in Shenzhen. VMA students will be able to take up to 6 ACT exams each year after completing the course assessment on campus, and are entitled to a series of official ACT supports. As with the SAT, students can use their ACT score to apply to all colleges and universities in North America.
In addition to regular courses, VMA also encourages students to actively participate in subject-based competitions and projects, including the American Mathematical Modeling Competition, the American Mathematical League Cup Competition, the Australian Mathematical Competition, the American Young Physicist Championship, the FRC Robotics Competition, and the American Academic Ten Olympiad, as well as the National Economics Contest, International Genetic Engineering Machine Contest, International History Contest, Microsoft Innovation Cup Big Idea Challenge, American Bio Olympiad, British Bio Olympiad, International Linguistic Olympiad, Interdisciplinary Project Research, Capstone course research and academic paper writing, etc.