This quantitative study aims to identify the mastery level of Arabic academic vocabulary (AAV) as well as to identify differences in AAV mastery among students between six public universities in Malaysia using receptive and productive AAV test instruments. Researchers constructed AAV test questions based on the test format introduced by Schmitt (2000) with some modifications. A total number of 50 academic vocabularies were filtered from the Academic Word List (AWL) proposed by Davies and Gardner (2013) and was tested on 126 samples through purposive sampling. The data from the test were analysed descriptively using Microsoft Excel 2016 software and SPSS V25.0. The results of the study found that the overall mastery of AAV among Malaysian Public Universities (MPU) students is at a moderate level with a mean score of 66%. In addition, there is a significant gap in the mean percentage in AAV mastery, namely IIUM which recorded the highest level (mean = 88%), while UiTM has the lowest value (mean = 54%). The results of the Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there was a significant difference in AAV mastery among students between the public universities. The post-hoc Bonferroni test also recorded the same which the value of p = <0.05.