It was useful in that a lot of the texts they were studying purported to describe ideal government. Government officials often communicated with each other using obscure references to these texts, and their expectations about appropriate behavior were set by these texts. Anyone who got to the top of the tests could be guaranteed to be a good reader and writer with a huge body of shared literary knowledge with other government officials, not to mention being diligent and verbally intelligent.

It was useless in that the texts were vague and fictionalized, and people weren't asked to offer new interpretations of the texts or to apply them to modern circumstances. The tests were graded based on how elegantly students could reproduce the standard orthodox interpretations in elaborate essays.