In old psychological measurements, biased to careers, attention was focused on Psychometric Tests which would end up with Intelligence Quotients (I.Qs) of the candidates. The main goal of an aptitude or psychometric test is to ensure that a candidate possesses the amount of skill and cognitive ability to perform the duties of a job/role. The most common skill sets being measured by these tests include numerical, verbal and non-verbal reasoning skills.

These include methodological and substantive problems in cognitive measurement (including the measurement of abilities, aptitude, and achievement), psychopathology, personality measurement, and the measurement of preferences.

Whereas psychological tests (psychometric tests) have been used over many decades, they have been found difficult to standardize across languages, as they can contain culturally unconscious bias. This may put people from different cultural backgrounds at a disadvantage.

More importantly, Psychometric assessments can’t capture the full range of human emotions, motivations, and experiences, and relying too heavily on such tests can limit our understanding of individuals and teams. Although this is now seen as ineffective since it only provides for the locomotive ability of the brain, it provided a great pathway to current improvements.

To begin with, the old psychologist would manually score points based on induced stimuli ( specially prepared questions) and expert psychological observations, based on candidate responses. These are and were possible through above methods and evaluated using strong statistical tools that remain relevant today.

In attempts to improve and provide a means to career prediction, one would take a picture of the candidate and score the “hits” ( responses of high value) and the “flats” (weak responses), on the printed picture. This would be done using pens of different colours ( green for hits and yellow for weak flats and red for zero responses) such that the final product is a pattern of strong reaction paths. These were the common psycho sheets.

The final outlay would be a “body model” of “virtual signal paths” which makes it easy for other experts to understand and make deductions about the candidate. For example a pattern of green on the left diaphragm will indicate a strong use of the left brain, which all psychologists know is the mechanical brain and forecast strong potentials in science and logical decisions ( Holland, 1958)

But, as you may expect, this manual process would take painstakingly long for just one candidate hence the need to explore modern and technologically oriented solutions. Such need for automation of data capture and processing is what has given birth to Human Anthtopo-Biometrics (a combination of psychometrics, Anthropometry and modern Biometrics).