The UK government may still be at odds over what precisely Brexit means and when it will happen, but in Germany the British vote to leave the EU is already shaping the curriculum.

As part of their school-leaving exam, students of English in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg were last week asked to elaborate the differences between the hopes connected to the British referendum, and the reality of Brexit since.

In the written part of the Abitur test – the certificate of general qualification for university entrance, equivalent to the UK’s A-levels – about 31,000 students were handed a drawing by the Indian cartoonist Paresh Nath, originally published in the United Arab Emirates’ English-language newspaper the Khaleej Times in April 2016.

One of the cartoon’s panels, captioned Project Fantasy, shows a man with a bowler hat and a union flag soaring towards the skies in a UFO. The second panel, entitled The Realities, has the same man on an island encircled by four sharks, symbolising “chaos”, “trade issues”, “economic uncertainties” and “job confusion”.

Nath, who is based in New Delhi, said the idea for the cartoon came after reading about the Brexit debate in the British press.

“As a postgraduate in English and American literature, I have an affinity for British and European culture and liberal viewpoints. I weighed up the pros and cons of Brexit and spread the message through my cartoon to the public.”

A spokesperson for the Baden-Württemberg ministry of education, which designs and distributes the centralised written part of the exam, said the assessment was designed to test students’ knowledge of recent sociopolitical issues.

This year’s written English exam in the state has been the subject of a petition signed by 35,000 students who felt the reading comprehension exercise, based on an extract from Henry Roth’s 1934 novel Call It Sleep, was unfair because it used archaic vocabulary.