Time flies like a white horse, and in a blink of an eye, it is the end of July, and there is less than half a month, and it is time for autumn.

Scholars from various provinces have poured into Hangzhou, and the inns and hotels in the provincial capital have increased in price several times, but they are still full of people regardless of near and far. In this way, there are still many candidates who have to stay in private houses, and of course the price is only expensive.

At this time, walking on the street, your eyes are full of people wearing square scarves and straight shirts, if you can't speak official language, and you don't have 'Zhihu also' in your words, you are embarrassed to speak. For a while, the city was full of texts, sour and sour, and you don't need vinegar to eat dumplings.

At this time, the scale of the literary meeting was naturally much larger, and there were also some old-timers who had achieved extremely high rankings, who would come to the stage to give lectures at the invitation of the governor and the scholars.

Of course, this is not the time to talk about small words, this kind of literary meeting is actually a place for those who have come to pass on their experience to the candidates. From how to prepare for the exam to what you have learned when taking the exam, it is a popular topic for candidates.

Naturally, the discussion of the content of the exam is the top priority of the cultural association. Compared with the children's examination, the annual examination, and the scientific examination, the amount of questions and test subjects in the township examination have been greatly expanded, and many candidates who take the township examination for the first time often cannot adapt to the intensity of the examination, and their bodies and minds collapse.

Therefore, before the exam, you must fully understand the subjects and forms of the exam, and make complete preparations. The exam lasts nine days and is divided into three three-day sessions. Among them, the first scene is the first on the ninth day of August, the second scene on the twelfth day, and the third scene on the fifteenth.

In the first test, there are three righteous ways in the "Four Books", each with more than 200 words. The Five Classics have four righteous paths, each with more than 300 words. If you can't answer the answer, you can subtract one each, but don't expect a good ranking.

The second trial is a one-piece argument, more than 300 words. There are five judgments, one for the edict, the table, the inside, and the department.

The third test of scriptures, history, and strategies is more than 300 words. If you fail, you will be allowed to reduce two.

Obviously, the first session of the Four Books and Five Classics is to test the candidates' familiarity and understanding of the Confucian classics. The second session is to test the students' ability to distinguish right from wrong and write various official documents. The third session was to examine the students' knowledge of ancient and modern political affairs.

This set of examination content and regulations has been used since the reopening of the department in the seventeenth year of Hongwu. If the examiner can treat the three examination papers strictly and comprehensively examine the students, there is no doubt that most of the people selected are educated, knowledgeable and capable administrative talents. In order to avoid the selection of literate scholars, Emperor Taizu also canceled the 'trial poems' that the Tang and Song dynasties attached great importance to, and made it clear that they only relied on the application of literature and did not test the poetry and songs.

But alas, in the actual marking process, this is almost impossible. Because the township examination papers are notoriously short in time and heavy in tasks, gods and men cannot complete the work with quality and quantity.

The Daming Law stipulates that after the completion of the first test on August 12, the examiner will sign the papers in the room, and then each room will start to mark the papers separately. The time for the admission and release of the list shall not be later than the end of August, and it will only be ten days before the start of grading. After deducting the middle banquet and laughing, the real marking time is only three or four days.

In addition, the two examiners do not directly mark the papers, they just check the test papers recommended by the six same examiners and decide whether to take them or not. Therefore, all the marking tasks are pressed on a few fellow examiners. This was barely competent at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, because after years of war, the population has dropped sharply, and there are fewer scholars, for example, in the four years of Hongwu, only more than 1,200 people should take the Zhejiang township examination, and so far, this number has reached more than 4,000 people.

Moreover, the workload of marking the paper is not only determined by the number of test papers, but also depends on the amount of answers to the test papers. On average, students have to answer more than 2,200 words in the first game, 3,050 words in the second game, and more than 3,000 words in the third game, totaling nearly 10,000 words in the three games.

The heavy task of marking more than 40 million words is all on a few fellow examiners, and for these test papers, they must be careful about every word, and they must not be like the children's examination and scientific examination.

Because the township test is a ceremony for the country's talents, the person who is selected is qualified to be an official, and it is not an exaggeration to mention the degree of the rise and fall of the country. Therefore, in order to ensure the quality of the marking papers, after the announcement of the admission list, the provinces also need to send the examination papers of the selected candidates to the Ministry of Rites for review of the examination papers, which is called 'grinding and investigation'.

The officials who are noble and bored will review each test paper to check whether the examiner is cheating in the process of marking the paper, and whether the examiner is serious about marking the paper, such as whether there are typos in the test paper, the sentence is incomprehensible, etc., and whether the examiner has marked it. For the mistakes and omissions in the process of marking the papers with the examiner, once they are found out, they must be severely punished. According to the regulations, if there is no 'sentence reading' in the process of marking with the examiner, there will be a penalty of downgrading one level, and if the 'sentence reading' is wrong with the examiner, it will be fined for one year. If the circumstances are serious, they will be downgraded by several levels and fined for several years. Those fellow examiners are already petty officials of six or seven grades, who can stand it?

The idea of making a fuss about 'sentence reading' to let fellow examiners read the papers is simply perverted to the extreme. Because there is no punctuation for writing articles at this time, when grading with the examiner, you must carefully read every sentence of each article, otherwise you will not be able to break the sentence circle at all.

Therefore, it is impossible for the examiner to read ten lines at a glance, they must read it word by word, not only to pay attention to whether the text is smooth or not, but also to write comments on each test paper and state the reasons for whether to recommend the paper.

Think about it, there are so many test papers, the time is so short, and there are so few graders, and if there is a mistake, you will be impeached, demoted, and punished. And the content of the exam is so complex, involving so many genres, and the articles are thousands of faces, there are differences between ordinary and real, complex and simple, even if the same examiners are all gods, it is impossible to read all the test papers on time with quality and quantity.

Therefore, after hundreds of years of adaptation, the examiners gradually formed a tacit understanding, and only the first seven articles and eight strands of writing were graded, and for the next two games, only the text was smooth and there were no typos.

Why do you only weigh eight shares? Because this is a very strict format, it is easier for the examiner to grasp the advantages and disadvantages of right and wrong. Therefore, it can greatly improve the speed of marking, facilitate the evaluation of the suitability of the test papers, make all the test papers can be read one by one as scheduled, and minimize the subjective factors of the examiner, so as to ensure the seriousness and fairness of the official selection examination.

For example, the stylistic rules of Baguwen stipulate that only two sentences can be used to solve the problem at the beginning, if the meaning of the topic is not solved in two sentences, or although the meaning of the topic is solved, the sentences used are more than two sentences. or break the topic and fail to grasp the purpose of the topic, the god of the question; Or if the names of Confucius and Mencius and other sages are involved in the problem, but the pronouns are not used, this article is out of place and can not be taken. You can ignore the rest of the content.

Each of the following "subject matter", "original topic", "starting topic", "entry topic", etc., has strict format and chapter requirements, right or wrong, clear at a glance, and there is no dispute. If one of them fails, the volume can be deposed, saving a lot of time.

Basically, through this method of completely non-braining, more than half of the exam papers can be eliminated. For the remaining small half of the whole article, see whether it has achieved the beginning and end, whether the context is clear, and whether the level is clear. If you do a good job in these aspects, you can add comments from the examiner and recommend them to the two examiners for final decision.

Therefore, although its rigid procedures and rigid constraints are criticized, it is indeed that candidates can only follow the trend and dare not take half a step beyond leisure. However, it is precisely because it has strict regulations on the start, inheritance, transfer and combination, and even has strict regulations on the number of words and sentences, which enables the examiner to check each test paper at a glance, which greatly saves the time of subjective thinking, improves the efficiency of marking, and increases the objective surname of the marking, and minimizes the subjective factors of the examiner, so as to ensure the rights and interests of the candidates to the greatest extent, so that the truly outstanding can obtain fame. It is the most objective and fair way to acquire talents in this era...... How to write a good eight-strand essay requires years of hard reading and training that can only be done, and now it is too late to improve the level at this time. At this time, the senior teachers mainly taught the candidates the problems that should be avoided in writing, such as the need to avoid the imperial name temple, and not allowed to describe the place of the door, etc., to avoid these careless Jingzhou is.

In general, the township test is much stricter than any previous test, but there are also less stringent, that is, the font requirements for candidates are not high. Because all the exam papers will be transcribed by someone with the same handwriting, as long as you write the words clearly, it will not affect the results, and the same is true for the exam.

But this does not mean that a dignified and good word is useless, because in the palace examination, the way of on-site marking will be adopted, no need to transcribe, as long as the word is not written well, don't want to enter the second class, into the Hanlin, you say that a good word is important or not?

(To be continued)