What texts did students study to prepare for China's Imperial Examinations?

Factual Questions
1

I know that the specific matter and format of the exams differed both from year to year and over time, but I would be extremely interested in hearing if there are any documents detailing curricular requirements for the exam, particularly in the form it was given in during the early Song dynasty.

2

They studied the “Five Classics”;

The Book of Changes (I Ching)
The Book of Poetry (Shih Ching)
The Book of Rites (Liching)
The Book of History (Shu Ching)
The Annals of the Spring and Autumn (Lin Ching)

and also the “Four Books”

The Great Learning
The Doctrine of the Mean
The Analects of Confucius
The Mencius

3

something to keep in mind is that early Song dynasty was a really long time ago. I wonder just what sort of archival evidence can remain from that time given that medieval Chinese cared less for the “ephemera” than modern Western librarians.

We know a lot more about these exams in their Ming and Qing versions since by at the time there were so many people taking them that it became a staple of Chinese popular culture. Our prof even told us that by 19th century “beat the SAT, err, imperial examinations” were a popular genre of mass consumption literature, so presumably the scholars of the subject know a great deal about its latter forms.

ETA: they probably started out studying Thousand Character Classic - Wikipedia and then proceeded to the texts mentioned by Captain Amazing.

4

I don’t know what the status of the extant corpus is for examination-related materials, but I do know that after Wang Angshi introduced greater standardization to the test format commercial printers took to putting out a massive number of study guides in the form of high-scoring essays from previous years, and after a while the government began to officially release select tests from highly successful candidates.

And when it comes to the four books and five classics, weren’t most aspirants required to study the accredited commentaries as much or more that the actual texts? I know more than a few fairly brilliant Confucian scholars were only recognized long after their death because they were unable to rise to prominence given that they opposed the viewpoints aspiring bureaucrats would need to comment on during the exam, and as such very few people had the time to study them in detail.