Abstract
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.
Keywords
Introduction
Croatians like to think of test cheating as indistinguishable from school life. Cheating is an accepted, widespread routine, even though it is officially illegal. One recent high-profile case of cheating even involved the Minister of Education, who remained firmly in office although the highest national body for academic ethics, the Committee for Ethics in Science and Higher Education (2016), ruled that he plagiarised academic work. Similarly, when talking about test cheating there is a certain resignation that this is a practice unlikely to change, as was summed up in the following comment made by one of the participants of the study that this paper draws on: ‘I wouldn’t say it’s our tradition to cheat … But it is something that has existed forever. Everybody has done it. It’s just how the system works’. Explanations of cheating as a cultural phenomenon can be found in commentaries on cheating in the post-socialist educational spaces (e.g. Magnus et al., 2002; Štambuk et al., 2016; see also Nalepa, 2016). This study wants to contest this blanket explanation, and take a closer look at cheating practices by investigating teachers’ ideas about test cheating in Croatian secondary schools and what they believe can be done about it. More specifically, the relationship between cheating and the introduction of standardised assessment is examined, in that standardised assessment is understood as a technical and objective procedure, where there is no cheating allowed (Broadfoot, 2007; Torrance, 2007). Drawing on Sen’s ideas on justice (Sen, 1999, 2009) and on Waldow’s work around legitimisation of borrowed policies (Waldow, 2012, 2014), the paper maps the trend of Croatian teachers’ handling of cheating and suggests that standardised testing cultivated a vision of fairness that was enmeshed with expectations of a perfect, but unachievable administrative procedure.
The text is organised as follows: first, the Croatian state matura is outlined as a standardised test, introduced as a means of improving education, bringing more transparency (i.e. reducing cheating) and elevating educational quality (MoSES, 2005). After that, a broader perspective on cheating and standardised assessment in the post-socialist context is taken, with the goal of building explanations on cheating that go beyond sweeping cultural explications. Such cultural generalisations often lead to the dichotomy of
The state matura: A standardised test, borrowed from elsewhere
The state matura is a standardised secondary school leaving examination, first introduced in 2010. It replaced the school-based matura, that is, a leaving examination independently organised by each Croatian secondary school. Although it still physically takes place at the school, with the schools’ own teachers as invigilators, the tests are centrally put together and externally marked. The state matura made it possible to compare students’ matura marks nationally. It also introduced a new way of selecting students for higher education, on top of the specific entrance examinations still conducted by some departments and faculties. Croatia’s secondary schools can be either vocational or grammar and the state matura reflects this difference. For example, all grammar school students must take the state matura exam at the end of their schooling, whereas this is optional for vocational school students. If, however, they wish to apply for university, vocational school students must sit the state matura exam.
The state matura consists of mandatory examinations in mathematics, Croatian (or another native language) and a foreign language (typically English), and elective examinations in as many subjects from the grammar school curriculum as the student wishes to choose. Even before it was introduced in 2010, commentators pointed out that the matura promoted inequality (e.g. Bezinović, 2009). Grammar and vocational school students are exposed to completely different curricula during their secondary education but have to all sit the same test (Bezinović, 2009). The secondary school curricula celebrate the diversity of talent, whilst the matura test concentrates on one set of learning outcomes. Put differently, on the surface the matura provides clinical and neutral test settings but the examination itself can be interpreted as unfair.
So why was the Croatian state matura introduced? One reason given was better connectivity between secondary and higher education in order to boost the number of university admissions (e.g. MoSES, 2005). Matura merged secondary school exit examinations and university entrance exams: instead of having to prepare for two separate examinations, students now prepare just the one. Increased quality and transparency also are mentioned as the matura’s goals (European Commission, 2013; MoSES, 2009; World Bank, 2012). The quality aspect so far has been epitomised by the rhetoric of the matura as a diagnostic tool for school improvement; however without much clarity on what exactly the matura improves and how. It is common to treat transparency, the notion of having objective test results, as commensurate with educational quality, for example: ‘[t]he state matura is an objective evaluation of student achievement in secondary education, which aims to improve the quality of learning and teaching’ (MoSES, 2017). Thus the aims of the matura can seem blurred and intertwined, but its simplest and clearest message remains that of transparency, that is, that clinical test settings will prevent cheating and corruption (see also: Bethell and Zabulionis, 2012; Drummond and Gabrscek, 2012).
Another reason behind the introduction of the matura can be found by considering the broader political and social context. For example, the World Bank provided loans to numerous post-socialist countries to reform their education systems 1 during their ‘transition’ from socialism to capitalist democracy (Drummond and Gabrscek, 2012; Silova, 2005; Silova and Steiner-Khamsi, 2008). Between 2005 and 2009, Croatia received a World Bank loan of over $85 million to put into place mechanisms that would make Croatian education more managerial and neoliberal, with a strong assessment system as its centrepiece (World Bank, 2005, 2012). Despite the engagement of the World Bank and other actors in promoting similar ‘education policy packages’ (Silova and Steiner-Khamsi, 2008) across various East European and Eurasian countries, it has been found that each setting implemented the policies very differently. What is more, policies endorsed by global players like the World Bank, get instrumentalised to serve local purposes, changing their original meaning and intention in the process (Silova, 2005, 2012).
It should thus be highlighted that standardised assessment in a country like Croatia is not quite the same as one might imagine standardised assessment in an Anglo-American context, where it is a function of neoliberal, managerial policies in education. For one, the difference between vocational and grammar schools already indicates the discrepancy between the teaching curricula and the learning measured at state matura tests. Furthermore, the Croatian state matura is low-stakes for teachers and schools, as there is little in the way of holding teachers or schools accountable for matura results, and no real external pressure from policy makers to influence teaching to achieve better results at matura level (cf. Zadelj, 2017). This is not atypical for a post-socialist country; indeed it seems common to establish standardised assessments at the end of secondary schooling before they have a bearing on the curricula, teaching and learning (Bethell and Zabulionis, 2012; Drummond and Gabrscek, 2012; see also Minina, 2016). Thus, in practice, instead of accountability, such assessments primarily serve to transparently select candidates for university. As the perception that tests can be corrupted is normally much higher in post-socialist countries than in Anglo-American countries, some authors have described the exhaustive and rigorous ways in which post-socialist countries attempt to achieve assessment transparency, proclaiming this transparency as better and more meticulous than that in the West (e.g. Bethell and Zabulionis, 2012). The next section examines how test cheating can feed into a particular inferior positioning of post-socialist countries in educational space.
Test cheating in post-socialist countries
Croatia is a post-socialist country which experienced fundamental changes in all aspects of life after the collapse of state-socialist communist ideology in the 1990s, including a war fought between 1991 and 1995. Like other successor states of Yugoslavia, Croatia differs from other post-socialist countries in that it never belonged to the Warsaw Pact. It had its own version of self-governing socialism (Bacevic, 2006; Sobe, 2005). Nevertheless, there is a shared political and economic backdrop to all post-socialist states, along with experiences of deep transformations over the past 30 years. Post-socialist literature assumes that the post-socialist space requires a special point of view for understanding educational change because post-socialist countries do not follow a predictable trajectory towards a specific state of being (Silova, 2009). So is, for example, the term ‘transitional country’ misleading, because it is unclear what a transitioned country looks like. Countries in the post-socialist space transform differently from one another, despite having similar ideals and values about improvement and despite being exposed to comparable neoliberal ‘reform packages’ (Silova and Steiner-Khamsi, 2008; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). An important point here is that policies usually are not locally developed; instead they are copied in a process of educational lending and borrowing that is facilitated by so called ‘policy brokers’ (Grek and Ozga, 2010) and supranational organisations such as the World Bank or the OECD (Robertson and Dale, 2006). In this process, the settings of the policy lender are experienced as the ‘norm’, as something to be strived towards, but never really achievable.
Post-socialist scholars thus emphasise how borrowed policies almost never address the same educational issue in the land of the borrower and originator, much less in the same manner. They are changed to suit local needs (Silova, 2005; Silova and Eklof, 2013). Accordingly, the position is that borrowing does not happen unilaterally but is instead a web of entangled and mutual interpretations that constantly inform local practices and policies. Nevertheless, the power relationship is such that discussions on borrowing and lending underlie a very rigid perspective, where policies of the West are judged as superior to educational solutions elsewhere (Carney et al., 2012; Tikly and Bond, 2013). Being designated the role of the policy borrower, post-socialist countries assume an inferior position, evaluating the local state of affairs as lesser or underdeveloped, rather than just different.
A closer look at standardised testing may perhaps clarify some of these claims. For example, Drummond and Gabrscek cite Bereday (Drummond and Gabrscek, 2012) who describes how standardised testing in socialist education was initially dismissed as bourgeois. Instead of standardised testing, a constructivist and humanist vision of education was pursued, which expected teachers to apply professional discretion to award marks based on their interaction with the student (explaining why oral examinations were popular in socialist education). Add to that the existence of diverse secondary curricula like in Croatia and it becomes clear why this does not bode well for a standardised, uniform approach to school leaving examinations. In simplistic binary terms, it could be argued that socialist education was premised upon principles of student-centredness and constructivist learning, whereas the meritocratic approach endorsed in the West has a more modernist and positivist outlook. Of course, both positivist and constructivist epistemologies inform educational policies and practices both in the West and in (post)socialism (see for example, Biesta, 2011; or Lundahl and Waldow, 2009; and Waldow 2014). The problem is the tendency towards explanations that are binary rather than relational (Silova et al., 2017). This often limits what can be seen but more importantly, dualistic thinking tends to position one side, usually the Western, as ‘better’ (Aydarova et al., 2016; Carney et al., 2012). When cheating occurs it will often be explained by way of self-identification as a culture of degraded values and prevalent corruption, as Croatian teachers (Štambuk et al., 2016) and some East European scholars (e.g. Nalepa, 2016) have done. On the other hand, when test cheating in the United States of America (USA) increased following the introduction of high-stakes standardised assessment, the phenomenon was rarely explained with declining cultural morals. Rather, the issue was contained within discussions on whether high stakes lead to cheating (e.g. Amrein and Berliner, 2002). During the cheating scandals at Eton and Westminster College (e.g. The Telegraph, 2017), nobody automatically assumed that the entire British independent school system was flawed. The point is thus, that it makes sense to attempt to surpass explanations of phenomena like test cheating with sweeping cultural or binary explanations. To that end, I focus on assessment procedure and the ways in which a policy like standardised assessment achieves legitimisation.
Comparative and transcendental justice in standardised examinations
To bring to the fore the difference between the idea of a fair test and the application of that idea in practice, I explored Amartya Sen’s (2009) concepts of ‘comparative’ and ‘transcendental’ justice. Comparative justice would refer to justice that manifests itself in a particular setting as the shared conventions and procedures surrounding the organisation and administration of an actual standardised test – the things that form a common an unspoken understanding of what is fair. The shared norms and rules are accepted and recreated by all participants, but this is no perfect justice. For example, Waldow (2014) analysed the examination systems of England, Germany and Sweden. He did not look at standardised assessment specifically but his study is helpful in understanding the difference between transcendental and comparative procedures. Waldow showed that procedures differed considerably among the three countries, even to the extent that what would be considered fair in one country, would be seen as corrupt or unacceptable in another (for example, that teachers know the students whose tests they are marking). Nevertheless, Waldow explains that each of the countries considered its examination system to be fair and merit-based. In Sen’s terms this can be described as comparative justice: a subjective and shared sense of fairness that is constantly re-constructed, adjusted and re-interpreted, based on judgements and agreements in lived, everyday situations (Sen, 1999, 2009). Transcendental justice (Sen, 2009), conversely, is the kind of absolute and perfect justice that is non-negotiable and applicable and valid anywhere. It is different from comparative justice it that it is not lived; rather it presents a timeless, unadulterated, acultural ideal of how things should be.
Oftentimes standardised assessment pertains to be an objective, acultural and value-free procedure that measures learning. More often than not, it is also uncritically accepted as such. In other words, standardised assessment is mistaken for a procedure that effects an absolutely just evaluation of learning, when in fact it is only one attempt at achieving a fair assessment of learning (Berry and Adamson, 2011; Broadfoot, 1996; Gipps and Stobart, 2009; Wyatt-Smith and Cumming, 2009). Thus, just like the examination systems studied by Waldow (2014), it is more the social conventions that give standardised assessment a seal of approval than their actual infallibility or absoluteness. Nevertheless, by the sheer quality of being institutionalised, they pertain to perfect justice. Broadfoot noted that the ‘apparently scientific character’ of educational measurement legitimises a whole variety of ‘practices, which far from being neutral, operate as a powerful structuring force in society’ (Broadfoot, 2007: 29), that is, they change teaching and learning.
Waldow (2014) noted that what gave examinations legitimacy in each country he studied was that they were unmistakably considered fair. Each examination system made reference to perfect fairness, but this fairness took different forms across different contexts. It could be speculated that the procedures in each individual context were considered fair because in the minds of educational actors from the countries examined by Waldow, transcendental and comparative justice were conflated. In other words, the routines and conventions surrounding the administration of examinations were so ingrained in local settings that they were automatically and unquestionably accepted as the perfect procedure for evaluating learning. This may have worked in settings that have not experienced fundamental transformations of all areas of life over the past 30 years, but post-socialist countries are not such settings. On the contrary post-socialist educational transformations over the past 30 years highlight the difference between what is supposed to be and the experiences of how things really are. Standardised assessment in post-socialist contexts is legitimised with ideas of absolute fairness and transparency of process (Bethell and Zabulionis, 2012; Kovalchuk and Koroliuk, 2012). For examining cheating in a post-socialist country like Croatia it was useful to look at how institutionalised procedures bring together ideas of perfect and experienced justice. How do teachers combine expectations of clinical, meritocratic settings with their perceptions of everyday test cheating? Would the borrowing of standardised assessment also transform mind-sets and alter classroom routines, changing ideas and practices around test cheating?
Methodology
Data utilised in this study came from my PhD research about the introduction of standardised assessment in Croatia. Teachers, school leaders and students from three vocational secondary schools (leading to degrees in areas of accountancy, health care and technology/mechanics respectively), one grammar school and one comprehensive school (offering both vocational and grammar school diplomas) participated in the project, which amounted to 28 individual and 27 group interviews. The interviews were semi-structured and lasted between 50 and 70 min. Secondary data included informal observations and informal interviews with teachers during the school visits, as well as an online teachers’ forum. Schools were visited in the middle, at the end and at the beginning of a new school year. Consent was obtained from the participating school sites. Rather than being nominated by headteachers, participants volunteered to take part in the interviews. The interviews were analysed using a thematic analysis approach (Guest et al., 2012). This data analysis strategy was chosen to address the needs of the unpredictable post-socialist setting and to allow the data to tell its own story, instead of forcing it into pre-conceived conceptual categories.
In the interviews, two different Croatian verbs were used to describe cheating. The first and more commonly used was
Cheating as part and parcel of school life
Students in Croatia cheat in several ways. Some of the more popular cheating techniques of the interviewed students were copying from a neighbour’s test and using cheat sheets. Cheating was seldom an individual affair. More often than not, students cooperated when trying to achieve a better mark on the test. As a pedagogue from the comprehensive school mentioned: ‘In the US, they promote competitiveness. … We aren’t used to that. Here cheating is the collective effort of students against the teacher’ (FgTCom3). This comment is a good example of how cultural generalisations can be used to condone cheating behaviours. Post-socialist students display a kind of camaraderie and cheat to deceit the teacher, the figure of authority, whereas in the USA, cheating students would be motivated by a desire to gain an advantage over other students. The teacher’s explanation reflects a mind-set where students are much better off if they ‘unite’ against the teacher. The assumption is also that students in the referenced country, the USA, see testing not as an opportunity to undermine teachers’ authority, but as a competitive arena, where they need to come out on top. Whilst test cheating undoubtedly occurs in both countries, the interviewee seemed to automatically assume a lesser position for Croatia, attempting to explain that it is the cultural mores that beget cheating.
The teacher’s stance that cheating is prevalent was also shared by the interviewed students. Cheating seemed normalised to such an extent that the students openly talked about how they organised test cheating. Cheating seemed to be more about friendship bonds and group cohesion rather than willingly planning how to create an unfair advantage. Student 1: This final year was the easiest [in terms of workload]… Student 2: Yes, we had a private Facebook group. This girl who just had to leave, she did everything for us. She went to two secondary schools simultaneously, to the music arts school and to ours. On top of that, she organised all our activities, our prom, she would let us know when we had what exam and what we needed to know at the test. Interviewer: This was all her own initiative? All: Yes. Student 2: So this has helped a lot. Student 3: Yes, that and earplugs (laughs) Student 2: In oral examinations we had earplugs and she would tell us the right answers through them (Fg2StAcc2).
In certain cases, students reported that teachers also profited from allowing cheating, for example: ‘We have teachers who during the test simply say: “Ok, I’m now going to look out the window for 15 minutes and you try not to make too much noise.” … I think they don’t want us to get all Fs and have to re-sit tests. That’s why they allow us to help ourselves’ (FgStMed2). This comment suggests that teachers let students cheat out of convenience. Teachers knew that low test results would lead to having to repeat tests, which would amount to more work for them. In the instance described above, the teacher was less motivated by professional goals to teach students and more by the desire to accommodate administrative goals. On the surface, the teacher respected procedures but at the expense of the students’ learning. This is reminiscent of the kind of cheating described in high-stakes contexts in the USA, where teachers cheated to handle the quality demands set on them (cf. Levitt and Dubner, 2005). In this way, teachers gave even more legitimacy to the administrative rules, cementing them as viable and good, but acted in complete opposition to the idea of supporting learning. This highlights a disjoint between the institutionalised rules and procedures that pertain to perfect justice and the actually negotiated solution in practice. Quite in contrast to Waldow’s (2014) examples where local practice and the institutionalised ideal overlapped, here they were clearly out of sync.
The concession that cheating was everywhere was also reflected in students’ answers about being at the receiving end of cheating, even at high-stakes examinations such as the state matura. Even here, some cheating practices, like copying, simply seemed to be accepted as part and parcel of life. Interviewer: What if you didn’t get into uni because you couldn’t copy [the correct answers] at the state matura, and somebody who could, did, and got into uni instead? Student: How would I know that? I don't know every student in Croatia by name. Anyway, that's too much analysing. If I am able to copy, I will … If I’m not able to, then that’s tough luck (Fg2StTech2).
This student's response recognises copying the correct answers as a common practice, even when leading to personal disadvantage. The student explained cheating possibilities as luck, that is, as something that cannot be controlled. The reality that most students, including himself would cheat if given the opportunity, was considered fair, like a shared concession and convention that underlined this contexts’ sense of lived, comparative justice. In this example, the term ‘copying’ is used deliberately, to contrast it to the kind of cheating generally considered as graver, as this student spoke explicitly about copying. It could thus perhaps be speculated that the student found copying acceptable, but not some other forms of cheating. Some leniency towards ‘intelligent’ kinds of cheating can also be found in teacher’s answers: ‘Cheating, well, that’s intelligence. It’s about being resourceful in a new situation’ (HtCom1). Another teacher remarked: ‘I think the more intelligent the student, the better ways of cheating they have. In grammar schools, they certainly cheat better than here in my school’ (LatMed3). This perspective seemed like a paradox: teachers were nominally against it, but in certain instances in their classroom practice cheating seemed acceptable. Even so, like the student, the teachers seemed to have an unspoken, but clear cut-off point for tolerance to more severe forms of cheating. It seems therefore that the sense of negotiated and comparative fairness had its own tacit margins for cheating – but they were out of sync with the kind of fairness promoted and displayed through matura procedures. In other words, the sense of comparative justice shared by teachers and students seemed far from the transcendental justice and transparency displays of the educational policy.
Displays of transparency: Perfect procedure is possible, but not always
Although cheating was understood as a common occurrence in school life, there was an understanding that students would not cheat at the matura exam. As mentioned earlier, the matura epitomised ideals of absolute transparency and meritocracy. Each school had a designated teacher for the administration of tests within the school, called ‘examination coordinators’. One such coordinator described the complex procedures that ensured clinical testing environments within schools:
On the day of the matura, we close off one wing of the school, so that the students can sit the test with no noise from the outside. We seal off the corridor, with one person in the corridor at all times. Per classroom there are two teachers invigilating. Only I am allowed to hand the exams to the invigilators. The teachers check the IDs and names of students. Everything that students bring with them goes on a designated desk. There is no chance to cheat, and if somebody is caught, they fail the test. They would not dare [to cheat]. Students are escorted to the loo, if they have to use it. The tests are sealed and scanned. They are put in special envelopes and have to be sent off by the end of the day. During the exam, a 6-person exam committee needs to be in the school to resolve any issues that come up (EcAcc2).
The procedures described by the teacher seemed very different from everyday school arrangements. As if this display of complex rules and timings, involving special papers, envelopes, safes, codes and increased security meant to convey a sense of corruption-free, objective testing environments (cf. Bethell and Zabulionis, 2012). In other words, a large effort had been made to showcase perfect, infallible procedures in a context where cheating normally trumped institutionalised procedures. The matura meant that perfect justice was possible, but only on special occasions. In practice, this brought on paradoxical and contradictory messages to teachers and students: cheating was normal, but matura made it controllable. It is what Silova and Steiner-Khamsi (2008) dubbed
The matura was sending off a message of a new and better manifestation of transcendental justice, whereas the conventions of the old and shared comparative fairness now looked less justifiable in comparison. But they were still defendable. An interviewed headteacher remarked that some cheating was inseparable from the schooling experience: ‘There isn't this understanding that copying is a very negative thing. Let's be honest, we all used to cheat in school. … So, it's really not that bad’ (HtCom1). For this headteacher, the copying from friends’ tests and the sharing of cheat sheets simply belonged to the fabric of schooling and there was no need to question it. Likewise, another teacher noted: ‘We used to write our own cheat sheets and during that process we would actually learn the majority of what needed to be learned, and the cheat sheet was a security, to have, just in case’ (SocGr2). In other words, the teachers did establish that the matura embodied a perfect, transcendental justice, but the type of more fluid conventions on cheating that existed outside of the matura were also accepted as part and parcel of school life.
Some commentators might interpret this to reflect the stereotype of the East European cheater, but this would only be viable if we took the position that standardised assessment really does reflect a transcendentally just and objective evaluation of student learning. As discussed earlier, what gives standardised assessment legitimacy is the belief that it is meritocratic, not its
Teachers’ handling of cheating
So far it has been argued that test cheating was accepted as a common occurrence, despite the introduction of standardised assessment. The strict and clinical test settings of the state matura seemed not to have spilled over to everyday school practices. This was fuelled by a shared belief that some cheating was omnipresent anyway and was rationalised as simply belonging to the schooling experience. Croatian teachers liked to be lenient towards copycats when they encountered them in practice, but they strongly condemned the practice of cheating in theory (see also Štambuk et al., 2016). Although the matura did not wipe out cheating practices, it brought to the consciousness of teachers and students that their more tacit and fluid conventions on cheating were wrong. With its rituals of transparency and its high stakes, the matura now represented the ideal of how things should be, but it was also plainly obvious to teachers and students that this ideal was not achievable in regular school practice. In seeking to understand the difference between cheating at the matura and cheating in everyday school life, teachers highlighted procedural differences between the matura and everyday practice, explaining that they had little means of sanctioning cheating students. Teacher 1: If we suspended somebody for cheating, that would be a revolution. They would say, how will you prove that? Teacher 2: (laughing) Yes, they would want to see video evidence. Teacher 1: I always give an F to anyone I catch cheating. But then I have to live with the criticism… School pedagogue: When competition becomes the driving force of the system, then those cases of deception will become less popular. But in a pedagogical sense, I’m not very happy about competition … Teacher 1: Well, I think it should all be sanctioned. That’s how it is in all normal countries. And the student should not have the chance to retake the test, if they cheated. We could say, your overall mark will be lower by one grade now and there is nothing you can do. Teacher 2: (laughing) I can already see parents, students, inspectors … [They would say:] the student was creative, showed initiative! Teacher 1: Yes, the inspector would tell you that. But that’s not the point, it is about fairness. But when it comes to it, it’s about proving it all on paper, which is impossible. Teacher 2: That will be very difficult to change. We all are used to it and it’s much easier just to turn a blind eye to it(FgTCom3).
This exchange between teachers explains the existence of cheating with teachers’ inability to sanction it. For the teachers, existing rules on cheating were ambiguous, leaving it in teachers’ discretion how to address cheating. The teachers in this excerpt joked about sanctioning students for cheating, as if to show how absurd and impossible the idea was. Thus, teachers only had their pedagogic authority to respond to student cheating, and could not use legal or other institutionalised means to sanction it. The excerpt showcases that teachers put the responsibility for the tolerance of cheating onto the educational administration, here represented by school inspectors. The use of the term ‘normal countries’ conveys an underlying tone that perfect institutional arrangements with no cheating exist in better educational settings, with a sardonic resignation that they are impossible in one’s own setting. This self-positioning as a less-developed educational setting with more problematic cheating practices epitomises the kind of power imbalances between recipient and lender when borrowing policies, that have been widely discussed (Carney et al., 2012; Straubhaar, 2014; Tikly and Bond, 2013; Tlostanova, 2015).
However, among the interviewees, there also was a minority of those who contested the commonly shared narrative of a cheating culture. One headteacher, for example, thought that the state matura only further fuelled the belief in widespread corruption. The degree of cheating this headteacher experienced in her practice did not correspond to the ever-present transparency rhetoric of the matura. I really don’t understand why people are afraid to openly say that they are against the matura. I am against it, and I say it openly, because I think it costs too much for the little it does. Its [educational] goals are unclear, and now it looks like the only goal left is mitigate corruption. That is worthwhile, going against corruption, but how much corruption is there really in getting students from secondary school to university. Do you know of any cases? I don’t … Perhaps we could have dealt with the corruption, if it really does exist, in a cheaper way and spent all that money on something more useful, like a curriculum reform (HtGr3).
This headteacher’s view of the matura exemplifies a point of tension with the legitimisation of the state matura through a narrative of corruption. Rather than automatically taking a dispirited perspective of a ‘lesser’ or ‘not-quite-there’ context, the headteacher spoke from the position of her own experience and her own understanding of teaching and learning. This allowed her to delink (Tlostanova, 2015) from an asymmetrical explanation building where norm-countries are referenced to construe one’s own context as problematic.
Discussion
This paper set to challenge sweeping and stereotypical explanations for perceived cheating in Croatia by discussing the relationship between the introduction of standardised assessment and test cheating practices. The hope is to have demonstrated that cheating practices, as experienced by the interviewed teachers and students, do not have a straightforward ‘cultural’ explanation, but need to be seen in the light of post-socialist transformations and the underlying mechanisms of knowledge building about post-socialist contexts, like Croatia. By highlighting the conventional optics of analysis, that is, a post-socialist versus West dichotomy (Carney et al., 2012; Silova et al., 2017), space was made to accept broader, more alternative explanations on cheating. This broader space hopefully contributed to more epistemic emancipation by challenging some normally uncontested ideas about cheating, learning and standardised assessment.
What complicates the understanding of test cheating, as shown in the examples presented here, is the relationship between cheating and the paradigms of learning, which influence teachers’ roles in the handling of cheating. Standardised assessment, with its normative idea of cheating and learning has little flexibility to recompense for students’ collaborative strategies or test preparation considering students’ overall learning. Conversely, teachers in some more holistic approaches to learning do have this flexibility. Furthermore, common assumptions on cheating that reflect a local ‘inferiority complex’ in comparison with the West (Tlostanova, 2015) convolute and constrain the cognitive and conceptual space for understanding cheating and perpetuate the sense of epistemic asymmetry between the post-socialist countries that introduced standardised assessment more recently and those in the West who have a longer tradition of it. Sen’s (1999, 2009) distinction between transcendental and comparative justice was especially helpful for delinking normative, transcendental claims to justice and perfect procedure from the more situated, relational, interactive and shared awareness of fairness. The delinking helped to relativise power claims of standardised assessment procedures as the uncontested norm for evaluating learning, but, drawing on Sen (1999, 2009), this does not mean that a norm does not exist. Rather, by participating in deliberations about comparative justices, and in uncovering their relational dynamics, one comes closer to more overall justice and better norms. For cheating and standardised testing this perhaps means looking for deeper, less obvious and more emancipatory explanations.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.