By then, Great Wei's commandery examination had also ended.
Unlike the county examination, this round had an extremely low pass rate. Fewer than one in ten scholars had passed.
This also showed that the scholars of the realm truly had very limited abilities.
Many scholars had even fallen seriously ill after the examination and had taken a long time to recover their senses.
The difficulty of this examination had brought many of them sharply to their senses. After leaving the commandery offices, they hurried straight to their own county offices to see whether there were any vacancies for county clerks.
They no longer thought of continuing with the examinations. The difficulty exceeded their limits, and they believed that even if they kept studying hard, they might still fail such an examination.
After all, the examiners this time were figures such as commandery governors. Officials of Two Thousand Shi had personally set policy questions on governance, while deputy commandery governors and the like had set mathematics problems and difficult questions on litigation and criminal law. Passing really did take some effort.
Cao Mao had imposed no age restrictions on candidates. In principle, people of any age could participate.
By this round, those who passed were generally at least thirty, and a few were even very advanced in years.
There were young scholars among them, of course, but not many.
After all, reading books alone was not enough for these things. They also had to analyze them in light of actual circumstances.
The questions on the classics did not ask candidates to supply the next line. Instead, they presented several difficult problems of governance and asked candidates to solve them using methods from the classics.
The agricultural studies questions no longer tested simple knowledge of farming seasons, either. They had become practical