I follow a precise system during English exams: I skip the passage entirely, jump straight to the comprehension questions, scan the keywords and look for them in the passage.

My teachers, as well as my parents, hated it. They spent years telling me it was a terrible way to read, arguing that skipping around ruins your grasp of tone or context. I ignored them because my method worked fine, well, at least for me.

I would grab the quick points needed for the test, write out my answers, and if there was time left at the end, I’d go back and read the text for fun. Honestly, sitting in an exam hall with twenty minutes to spare, reading an assigned passage with zero test pressure hanging over my head, was always the best part of the hour, like a little prize for ending the test early.

When I flipped through one of my English test papers a few weeks back, I spotted a piece that looked ideal for that post-exam treat. The opening paragraph was surprisingly good. It described a familial afternoon in an old house with the kind of hyper-specific visual details that only come from genuine memory. So I scribbled my five answers on the script and finally slumped back in my chair to read the rest.

Except, by the third paragraph, the floor gave out. The gentle, reflective tone vanished into thin air. In its place came a strange, uniform flatness that tried its best to amaze me but failed miserably. The sentences suddenly lengthened into identical structural blocks. The vocabulary began moving towards weirdly heavy choices dropped into contexts where they made zero sense, words like “urgent” and “high-stakes”.

Then came the sentence structure that gave the whole game away: phrases built specifically to reject a premise in the first half just to push a dramatic point in the second, you know, the same: “It’s not X, it’s Y”. The narrative voice stopped sounding like a person sharing an experience and began sounding like a statistical model guessing what an essay ought to look like.

It felt like catching someone lying directly to your face mid-conversation. I just froze there with my pen resting on my fingers. I took a look around to see if anyone else had the same astonished expression as mine. Spending hours on your own writing only to watch a published text devolve into automated filler feels like a joke.

You expect a real article, and instead you get a shell made of stolen ideas from overheating data centres. What made it ridiculous was the location: I was sitting in an exam hall with at least two thousand other students, taking a test written by a department with around 30 English professors. These are academics who make a living penalising us for awkward phrasing or weak transitions, yet they handed us automated filler on an actual university exam.

How does fake writing slip past thirty roomfuls of literature scholars?

Sitting there, I tried to figure out how something like that slips past an entire department. It hit me at one point that it was probably a tired junior teacher or a teaching assistant who put the paper together late at night to hit a print deadline. Shortcuts happen when people are overworked.

What actually pissed me off was realising nobody bothered checking the page afterward. No one glanced at the draft before hitting print. No one spent two minutes reviewing the test paper. Someone simply pasted the text, formatted the margins, ran off two thousand copies, and distributed them without a single person checking if the writing even made sense.

I couldn’t just drop it. It made me furious to the point that I didn’t even want to recheck my paper for fear that I’d have to read the whole text again. Right before handing in my test, I repeated the headline in my head constantly so I wouldn’t forget it on the walk to the invigilator’s desk.

The second I hit the hallway, I pulled out my phone and looked it up, fully expecting some abandoned blog or a cheap content farm. Instead, the top result took me straight to a major newspaper: the kind of legacy publication people cite over breakfast. That was when the real horror kicked in.

It’s easy to understand how an overworked university department makes a mistake on a mid-term test paper. It’s an entirely different matter when a famous newsroom, backed by dozens of senior editors and decades of journalistic reputation, prints automated text without batting an eye.

Millions of people read that publication daily. They pay for subscriptions, assuming the stories placed before them represent genuine human thought. Yet a massive media organisation with immense resources couldn’t spare one staff member to read a piece from start to finish before publishing it to the world.

What happens to a culture when no one actually reads what they print anymore? When the places responsible for keeping language alive stop reading what they print, something fundamental breaks in the background. Writing stops being a way to transfer real human experience and turns into cheap space-filler meant to occupy a screen or an exam sheet.

We are left sitting through tests built on unedited text, scrolling news sites that skip basic proofreading, and swallowing words no human mind ever bothered to process. I put my phone into my pocket and walked over to where my friends were sitting, completely fuming that my post-exam luxury got wrecked by a piece of published trash.