ZAGREB, June 6, 2020 – The 11th season of exit exams for secondary school leavers in Croatia starts on Monday, 8 June, with 32,114 students from 369 schools taking those exams in the circumstances marked by the COVID-19 epidemic.
The first matriculation tests will be for the Croatian language on Monday, and the season lasts until 3 July.
A total of 7,000 teachers are engaged in supervising and controlling the implementation of the process of taking the tests.
The National Centre for the External Evaluation of Education (NCVVO), which organises state graduation exams, has reported that 110 authors have prepared the tests.
Students are supposed to pass the school-leaving exams in the Croatian language, Mathematics, and a foreign language in order to be given certificates on their graduation from high school.
There are compulsory and elective subjects at the state graduation exam and they are equal for all students and are taken at the same time.
The students taught in the language and script of the ethnic minority can take an exam in the minority language as a compulsory together with Croatian, and they can opt between mathematics and a foreign language as a third compulsory subject.
The compulsory state graduation exams can be taken at two levels: the higher level (A) and the basic level (B).
Apart from the COVID-19 epidemic that has made schools introduce stricter epidemiological measures in the classrooms where school-leaving exams are taken, the 22 March strong quake that damaged thousands of buildings in Zagreb and its environs, including some of the high schools, has additionally complicated the organisation of the process of taking the exit exams.
