Mike:
Sorry--I really don't know very much about it. I know Wang Anshi as a poet and a prime minister, and I also know that the Han brought in the first real civil service exams, just after the fall of the Qin (around 300 BC). So the exams were NOT several thousand years old.
I think that Western accounts of civil service exams alway tend to emphasize how uncreative etc. they were. But every actual exam question I've seen suggests that they were most of the type:
Bu Xiao You San
Wu Hou Wei Da
There are three types of unfiliality.
Not having children is the worst.
(Discuss.)
Now, you can see that this is not a cloze exercise; it involves enormous creativity and interpretation (construct validity, that is, the quesition of whether this kind of creativity and interpretation has any role whatsoever in discriminating competent future officials from the other sort, is an entirely different matter).
How could it have been ANY other way? A country the size of China, with literally tens of thousands of test takers, could not possibly use a cloze test or a multiple choice test or ANY test based on memorization because there would simply be too many successful test takers and the test would lose its discrimination as well as its power to shape the civil service according to the dominant ideology (e.g. the "reform" ideology of Wang Anshi or the more conservative Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi).
There is also a healthy tradition of RESISTANCE to examination culture, including the Chinese classic "Rulin Waishi" ("How to Pass the Civil Service Examination", a satirical novel on the educational system) and "Wei Cheng" (a realist novel about foreign students in early modern China who come back to China with bought Ph.Ds and compare their marriages and their careers to a besieged city--everybody outside wants to get in and everybody inside wants to get out).
Sometimes this iconoclasm is reflected in the exam itself in various ways. During the cultural revolution, a examinee who handed in a blank paper became a national hero of the know-nothing Red Guards (and even, Trofim Lysenko style, became a college professor).
A couple of years ago, there was a "trick" question on the College Entrance exam in China which consisted of a story problem in which a college student was confronted with an apparently simple geometry problem to which the answer could be either a point OR a line OR a plane OR a space (e.g. describe the city of Xi'an as a geometrical form).
Of course, he answered all of the above. The essay question was to explain how each of his answers could be seen as correct. And THAT is one very good reason why the college entrance exam takes three days in China and only one day in Korea.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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