The entrance examinations of the past

The steady digitization of written and printed sources has made it easy to access entrance examination questions from 100 years ago. Lately, I have been looking at such exam materials from the Meiji and Taisho periods.
The materials used were the same as now, including The Confucian Analects, The Discourses of Mencius, and The Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), but how were these texts employed at the time? This question has interested me greatly as of late, and I continue to look for an answer.