In the end, she decided to divide the exam into five sessions, with over two thousand people per session, which was manageable. Each exam would last two hours, and she could complete it in one day. However, this meant she had to prepare several sets of similar exam papers.

Additionally, she needed to find more people to act as examiners. With over ten thousand applicants, but only about a hundred positions available for the trial run of the town government in Seville, she needed to be selective. The written test was the first filtering stage, and it had to eliminate the majority of applicants. Only the top one thousand would...