Test cheating and standardised assessment in Croatia: Changing procedures, changing minds?

This paper attempts to explain why test cheating in Croatia seemingly prevails despite the introduction of a standardised examination, the state matura. It offers a contrast to sweeping cultural explanations of the stereotypical Eastern-European cheater and attempts to examine the issue more thoroughly. The Croatian state matura is a secondary school exit examination which was adopted as part of the surge of neoliberal policies around the world and was financed through a World Bank loan. The position taken here is that borrowed neoliberal policies, like standardised assessment, lead to unpredictable and unexpected responses in post-socialist settings (Silova, 2010 ; Steiner-Khamsi and Stolpe, 2006 ), offering new perspectives and explanations on educational practices more generally. The concepts of comparative and transcendental justice (Sen, 1999 , 2009 ) are used to illustrate how cheating practices in Croatian educational settings seemingly prevailed, despite the introduction of the state matura. The paper maps the trend of Croatian teachers’ handling of cheating and suggests that standardised assessment cultivates a vision of educational fairness that is both enabled and constrained by a belief in a perfectly just procedure.