Educational dishonesty in the context of assessing the quality of human capital

It seems that in Poland, compared to other countries, the general attitude towards cheating is more liberal. School dishonesty, as proved by this and previous research, is common. At the same time the territorial differentiation of the average school test scores is counterintuitive, considering what is known about differences in regional development in Poland. This leads to the hypothesis that the level of the educational dishonesty in Poland may be regionally differentiated, and that the test scores may be significantly affected by regionally differentiated cheating. A quasi-experimental analysis shows that dishonesty in Polish schools does take place even during standardized tests, but that it is not really regionally diversified. There is, however, some evidence that cheating is much more frequent in rural environments and in small cities than in more urbanized areas. This suggests that some of the interregional variation in education outcomes may be related to educational dishonesty as long as the regions differ in level of urbanization. Nonetheless, dishonesty should not be considered as a crucial determinant of regional distribution of test scores. peerReviewed publishedVersion