At midnight, Sunday, January 31, the applications were closed for the State Graduation Examination. A total of nearly 40 thousand candidates applied. The majority of the candidates who applied via the National Information System for Applications to Higher Education Institutions (NISPVU – www.postani-student.hr ) before the deadline were four-year vocational school graduates, a total of 19,461, which represents 92% of the total number of four-year vocational school graduates.
The second largest group of applicants were graduates of gymnasiums – four-year grammar schools – a total of 12,668 or over 99% of those students, out of the 12,738 registered in E-Matica (high schools information system), applied.
Finally, a total of 7831 candidates from other groups of students applied for the Examination. Among them, the majority were from previous generations of graduates of Croatian high schools – 5943 of them – while the remaining 1888 candidates have attended or had completed high schools abroad. Out of the total number of applicants not registered in E-Matica, 4380 have submitted the necessary documentation, and it is expected that this number will reach over 5 thousand when all the documents sent by post are collected.
The candidates have applied for a total of 168,370 examinations. The state graduation examination most applied for was the Mathematics test at the primary (B) level which received over 27,568 applications. Almost equally popular were the Croatian Language test at the higher (A) level, with 23,354 applications, the English Language test at the higher (A) and the basic (B) level with 17,466 and 16,298 applications respectively, the Croatian Language test at the basic (B) level with 14,987 applications and the Mathematics test at the higher (A) level, with 10,766 applications.
Out of the elective subjects, the most popular were Physics (10377 applications), Politics and Economy (10081 applications) and Biology (8836 applications). The examination with the smallest number of applications was the Spanish Language test at the basic (B) level – only one person applied for it.
The State Graduation Examination starts with tests in elective subjects (Psychology and Computing), which will be held on February 19th. Examinations in mandatory subjects begin in the second half of March. On March 16th essay composition test will be held in the mother tongues of students who attended schools in the languages of national minorities (Serbian, Hungarian, Italian and Czech), while the essays in Croatian Language will be written on March 17th.