Recently, the 42nd ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for Asia (Qingdao) was held at the Stadium of the China University of Petroleum (East China). The teams from NEFU won two silver medals and one bronze medal in the competition.

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is an annual event organized by the Computing Society, a long established and authoritative organization in the international computing community, to demonstrate innovative ability, teamwork, and the ability to program, analyze, and solve problems under pressure for college students. The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is acclaimed as the "Olympic Games" for the IT industry. Students who have obtained good competition results are highly recognized by domestic and foreign universities and famous technology companies. In other words, they have acquired tickets for postgraduate education or jobs at high-tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba.

1,095 participants in 365 teams from 225 colleges and universities and 1 secondary school from mainland China, Hong Kong, China, and North Korea participated in the competition. All 985 project universities and 211 project universities in China took part in the contest to compete for the 2018 World Finals qualification. Participating colleges and universities, participating teams and the number of entries were the highest on record for ACM. The competition eventually produced 36 gold medals, 72 silver medals and 108 bronze medals. NEFU teams won 2 silver medals and 1 bronze medal. These are the third and the fourth silver medals won by NEFU in this event after a lapse of 2 years.