Thirteen years of reading Shakespeare, poetry and persuasive essays, and Western Australia's Year 12s were asked to analyse a text about Skibidi Toilet.
The viral internet meme, an animated series in which human heads sing out of toilet bowls, turned up in the ATAR English exam sat by students across WA on Friday morning, 30 October 2026. Within minutes of leaving exam rooms, students had flooded TikTok and other platforms with their reactions, The West Australian reported.
Where it appeared
According to students, the reference sat inside one of the texts in the comprehending section of the three-hour paper, the part of the exam made up of two questions and worth about a third of the marks.
The text was reportedly an opinion piece from The Guardian, published about two years ago, that argued endless doom-scrolling was rotting our collective attention span. To make its point, the article described the 11-second Skibidi Toilet clip in vivid detail, including its nonsense chorus of "skibidi dop dop dop yes yes".
For a generation that grew up with the meme, reading those words under exam conditions proved a lot to handle.
How students reacted
Students posting online said they had trouble keeping a straight face. One wrote that they never thought they would be discussing Skibidi Toilet in their WACE exam, while another said the text was "impossible to analyse with a straight face".
Not everyone was amused. One student summed up the frustration of a dozen-plus years of schooling ending with a toilet meme in the subject almost every Year 12 sits.
"14 years of school and we get Skibidi Toilet for our most important exam ever." — a Year 12 student, posting online
Others were pleased to see a question touching on the rise of artificial intelligence elsewhere in the paper, a topic many had expected.
A new exam-day legend
The English exam has a habit of producing a talking point that WA students carry into the rest of the exam period. Last year it was a pair of texts about swooping magpies, which spawned a wave of memes. The year before, students were asked to interpret a picture of a Hills hoist.
Skibidi Toilet now joins that list, and it may be the most fitting yet: a meme about "brain rot", set by examiners, for the students who invented the phrase.
It is the second ATAR exam this week to get people talking. Earlier, the School Curriculum and Standards Authority said no student would be disadvantaged after the ATAR chemistry paper printed a chemical formula incorrectly in a seven-mark question.
What happens next
English is the one subject sat by most Year 12s, but the exam period is far from over. More than 13,000 students are enrolled in at least one ATAR exam, and papers continue until 19 November 2026. Results and ATARs are released in December.
For now, Perth parents may want to brace themselves for a few more choruses of "skibidi dop dop" around the dinner table this weekend.
Photo: Hauwasysy via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). File photo of students sitting an exam; not a WA ATAR exam.
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