I am currently in fact doing an apprenticeship to civil serviceship. And I can tell you that knowing German classical literature or not has no bearing on my ability to perform well as a civil servant.
In fact the vast majority of knowledge I am currently attaining is about various laws because most of the work of a civil servant includes applying or interpreting various laws.
So you would think that the imperial Chinese examinations also would have been about legal knowledge no?
You are certainly right when you point out that the Imperial examinations leaned heavily towards poetry and Confucian philosophy. In fact, many contemporary Confucianist scholars and officials even pointed that out themselves as a weakness in the system! For example, Zhao Guang(趙匡), who was a provincial governor during the Tang dynasty, wrote <選擧議>, which means 'A discussion(議) on the selection by exam(選擧)', meant to be sent to the Emperor. In the article, which was comprised of ten shortcomings of the current system, Zhao pointed out that 'the old philosophical text that students study doesn't really help them with their actual duties', and 'they don't learn the real-life useful texts', and 'poetry has nothing to do with governing'.
With that said, the reason that exams still continued to lean heavily towards Confucianism was because,
a) It really wasn't meant to select a bunch of low-ranking officials. They selected only a few hundred from the entire country, and there were other ways to become officials. The select group of officials selected were on a fast-track to becoming politicians, not just civil servants. Since Confucianism was helpful in that regards, (it kinda was birthed from 'How to Govern : politics' in the Warring States era) there could be some justification in testing the candidates for their knowledge of the Confucianist texts. An European analogy would be medieval scholars studying old texts like Aristotle's Politics. Machiavelli certainly did.
b) Also, 'Confucianist texts' were not neccesarily ancient, out-of-touch books droning solely about philosophy. To cite one example, the <Discourses on Salt and Iron> written out during the Han dynasty was often used as examination text. It's about the pros and cons of the government monopolizing salt and iron trade, which was hugely important on economy and politics. So, yeah, not solely on philosophy for its own sake. And the texts continually got updated as well of course, as the eras went by.
c) Part of the reasoning behind the exams was that even if it came to worst, scholars reckoned that the student who did a better job on memorizing the given text was 'brighter' than the other student who lagged behind, so he must be a better hand when it comes to actual administrative work as well. Sometimes it worked out, somtimes it didn't, which brings us back to the first bit - that contemporary scholars knew, and commented about the shortcomings of the exam system. I'm too lazy to find and cite the relevant sources, but Zhao was hardly the only person to criticize the exam system being a farce, ancient literature being useless, etc, etc. Especially the so-called '8-Legged Essay'. That really got a LOT of flak.
So TL:DR; Yeah, testing them on writing poems, sonnets and stuff was a bit rubbish, to the point where even contemporaries criticized it. But Confucianist texts actually held some helpful advice about governing, and was somewhat useful at selecting the brightest lads even if it came to worsts.
sourced from : Kim, "A Study on Wang Dingbao(王定保)'s Tangzhiyan(唐摭言)" / Kang, "On the Reform of the Imperial Examination and Culture in the Song Dynasty and It's Characteristics". An additional interesting text might be <The Middle Kingdom> by Samuel Williams, who, as an 19th century missionary wrote about and pointed out the shortcomings of the Chinese exam system from an European POV. (its goal is fundamentally different, lacks education about useful sciences, etc)
There is already quite a detailed post in this thread so I won't go into a huge amount of further detail here, but I would disagree with its emphasis on the practical implications of the civil service examinations. The useful skills that the examinations occasionally demanded were not nothing, but they were at most the side effect of a system whose primary purpose was the self-perpetuation of an elite class. Competing in the exams was not simply a proof of one's practical eligibility for office, but rather a demonstration that the examinee had absorbed the cultural and philosophical values that underpinned the bureaucratically-minded scholar-gentry elite. This is particularly borne through by the fact that during the Ming and Qing periods, you typically needed to pass several exam tiers to gain eligibility for government office, but were already entitled to privileges from holding lesser tiers. Such lower-degree holders were, by this later period, a considerable chunk of the landholding and mercantile elite, and the possession of these degrees was not just a means of gaining various legal privileges, but also a key affirmation of elite status.
The basic qualification for a literatus was the cultivation of literate culture (wen 文), and the format of the examinations tended to stress this. While the Ming and Qing exams lacked the poetry requirement (excised during the Song), they quite explicitly assessed style as well as content in the essay and prose sections. The increasingly formulaic nature of the examination system does not reflect a slide into impracticality, but simply shifts in how the literati understood their own cultural basis. That the formulae didn't offer much if any scope for direct reflection on pressing issues or specific problem-solving was fine, because that wasn't the point – the point was to prove that you were a cultured gentleman (perhaps worth noting here that as far as can be known, all candidates were men) who followed the prevailing intellectual trends of the establishment elite. The sort of 'merit' being assessed was not the very specific skillset required of a career civil servant on the job, but rather the degree to which one embodied the expected ideal values of a Confucian gentry scholar.
A useful point of comparison may be the British examinations for the Indian Civil Service. Their earliest incarnation from 1855, inspired ultimately by the arguments of Thomas Macaulay, gave out marks as follows (all papers were, in theory, optional, and candidates could pick which ones to sit):
| Marks | Subjects |
|---|---|
| 375 | Language, Literature, and History of France/Italy/Germany; Sanskrit/Arabic Literature and Language |
| 500 | English Composition, English Literature and History, Natural Science, Moral Sciences |
| 750 | Language, Literature, and History of Greece/Rome |
| 1000 | Mathematics |
Notice that Greek and Latin, which had no practical use for administration in India, were valued at twice as much as Sanskrit and Arabic, which you'd think would be more useful – and note of course the lack of any assessment of Indian vernacular languages.
And this state of affairs continued into the early twentieth century. The 1893 exams gave 750 marks each for Greek and Latin Language and Literature, compared to 500 for Sanskrit and Arabic; 400 each for Greek and Roman history, while the 500-mark Modern History paper required only one period to be Indian history; 500 marks were given for Roman Law and 500 for English Law, but nothing for Indian law. The margin had widened again by 1911, when Sanskrit and Arabic were worth 600 marks compared to a maximum of 1000 each for Greek and Latin, but the Greek and Roman History categories remained while the Indian history requirement seems to have been dropped from the General History option.
Why bring all this up? Because, to be frank, it shows that European civil service exams did not assess that many hands-on practical skills either, but continued to privilege assessment of the sorts of knowledge and ways of thinking that underpinned the (white) establishment elite. Between 1904 and 1913, 501 Europeans were recruited into the Indian Civil Service via open competition, compared to 27 Indians. After a period of exam reform in 1892, Oxbridge students accounted for 77% of the ICS' intake, most of them students of Classics (a smaller number were students of Mathematics). This in many ways makes the ICS exams a perfect analogy for the Chinese imperial exams in terms of their aim: they weren't there to test your qualification for the job in terms of hands on skill, but rather through the demonstration that you were part of the classically-educated establishment in-group.