This study aims to establish a concept of academic competence, and to examine components of academic competence, in the hopes of developing a general education curriculum for international students. Academic competence refers to a student’s knowledge and abilities to process new information in the context of academic performance. It includes linguistic competence, knowledge competence, skill competence, cognitive competence, and affective competence. General education courses designed for international students at Korean universities have focused on improving Korean proficiency, or on training certain study skills that can be used immediately in the context of academic performance. However, the current courses do not seem to be sufficient to enhance the academic competence of international students. This is because other elements, such as students’ background knowledge and content knowledge for learning new things, their logical and critical thinking skills, as well as their affective factors, such as their motivation and attitudes toward learning, should be accumulated and improved along with their Korean proficiency, in order to enhance their academic competence. We thus proposed an academic competence based curriculum which is designed for international students, including all components of academic competence. In this curriculum, we varied the proportion of each competence presented above based on the Korean proficiency level of students. In addition, we proposed a separate, mandatory core curriculum, along withan optional curriculum, to enable students to further enhance their specific academic competence. Lastly, examples of course subjects were also presented.