Research on success in the education system, in addition to its cognitive determinants, has recently been increasingly emphasizing affective and motivational determinants of success. Expectancy-value-cost motivation theory has proved useful in researching motivational patterns in education. The scale of the same name, which is often used in American research, also derives from this theory. The scale in the conducted research shows good psychometric characteristics, but it is relatively new in Croatian research. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate, that is, it is necessary to check its metric characteristics, which is also the goal of this paper. It has been translated into Croatian and adapted as the Motivation Scale for the State exam. The sample was collected through the website postanistudent.hr, and it consists of a total of 4761 Croatian high school graduates, of which 26.5% are male and 74.4% are female. The subjects Croatian Language and Mathematics at the basic and higher levels were used to check the predictive validity, and the results show the appropriate structure of the scale. The existence of three factors - expectation factors, value factors and role factors, where expectations factors and values are positively related to each other, and negatively related to the role factor, was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. A reliability check was made for all three dimensions separately, which shows high dimensional reliability, Cronbach α 0.93 for the expectation dimension, 0.88 for the value dimension and α 0.84 for the stake dimension. Regression analysis showed that the scale as a whole is a statistically significant predictor for exams in Croatian language and mathematics at the basic and higher levels. At the level of dimensions, statistically significant predictability is achieved by the expectation and the stake for the higher level of the Croatian language exam, and the dimension of the stake for the basic level of the Croatian language exam. At the higher level of the Mathematics exam, all three dimensions show statistically significant predictive validity, while at the basic level of the Mathematics exam, only the expectation dimension is a statistically significant predictor.