The last exam

The Chinese imperial examination, in some form, ran for about thirteen centuries. At its height it was the main route into the civil service, open in principle to almost any man, and it shaped an entire culture's idea of what education was for.

The system solved a real problem. Before it, administrative posts went to the families that already held them, and the examination replaced inheritance with performance on a standard test. Candidates were sealed into individual cells for days. Papers were recopied by clerks so that handwriting could not identify the author. The anonymity procedures were more rigorous than many modern systems manage.

It also produced the pathologies that any high-stakes examination produces, and produced them for long enough that they became visible at a scale no modern system can match. A vast preparation industry grew up. The syllabus narrowed to what was examinable and then calcified, so that by the nineteenth century candidates were being tested on a literary form of no practical use whatever. Families impoverished themselves funding decades of study for sons who failed repeatedly, and the figure of the elderly perpetual candidate became a stock character in fiction.

It was abolished in 1905, and the abolition is sometimes described as a modernising triumph and sometimes as the destruction of the only ladder a poor family had.

Both descriptions are accurate, which is the point. A mechanism can be simultaneously the fairest available route and a machine that consumes the lives of most of the people who enter it, and no reform of the mechanism alone resolves that.