Abstract: The author found that the interest and effort in diagnosing personality andconduct for the appointment of men on their merits had already prevailed inChina about the beginning of the Christian era. At that time Chinese scholarstended to advocate that, being the voice and picture of one's mind, our speech(word) and handwriting should be used in mental testing. Hence the speed ofspeaking and writing was used as an index of intelligence, and method ofinterrogation as important means in personality assessment. The procedures usedat the end of 1920s by H. Hartshorne and M. A. May in their CEI Tests formeasuring honesty, service and self-control had been proposed in Cnina aboutthe 20s of the third century. Completion tests were widely used in the imperialexaminations since 8th century. Various methods of paired antithetical phrasessimilar to the opposite analogies in Stanford-Binet scale were devised by Chinesepoets later on. Ever since the middle of 6th century, some kinds of sensori-motor tests similar to the Buhler's and Gesell's had been applied to the babiesat their first birthday in south part of China as a traditional practice untilrecently. Long before the appearance of Seguin's form board, a 7-piece puzzleanalogous to and much more difficult than the Kempf's diagonal form board,had been developed as a non-verbal intelligence test. not yet standardized. Theso-called shape analysis tests now used elsewhere abroad are only a simplifiedform and the paper-pencil type of this puzzle. It is mentioned in this sketch that the first distraction test of the world wasconducted thirteen centuries ago by a well-known Chinese literary critic. In thistest subjects were asked to draw a square with left hand and a circle withright one simultaneously. Also noted are the rudimental data from historicaltimes concerning the predictive value of test results, the method for rating thevividness of auditory imagery and the interpretation of achievement in termsof group reference.

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