Failure Stories: Interpretations of Rejected Papers in the Late Imperial Civil Service Examinations.

This article investigates the practice of returning marked papers to rejected candidates in late imperial Chinese examinations. The practice--common from the sixteenth century to the abolition of imperial examinations in 1905--established a sense of personal communication between examiners and examinees and was an opportunity for rejected candidates to benefit from the examination system. The failed papers returned to their authors enabled them to make sense of their performance by interpreting, when not misconstruing, examiners' comments. The examiners sometimes praised the papers and blamed the decision to fail on other examiners. As a result, most rejected candidates tended not to challenge the examiners through official channels or take collective action against the examination system. Thus, in the late imperial examination system, the ways in which rejecting decisions could be negotiated and construed were no less important than the awarding of degrees to an extremely small proportion of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]