Absolutely none. I THINK I recall 1 required mtg w/ a censor, but have no idea what was discussed. Then there was some stupid interests pie chart associated w/ (I think) the PSAT.
I remember a thing in the 1960s called the Kuder Preference Test. It was a list of questions like “Would you rather collect butterflies or paint a picture?”
I took the test as honestly as I could, thinking “This great; now I’ll know what I should study in college.”
My test results indicated that I had not taken the test seriously. Bah! Yes, I did. Guidance Counselor said “Why is a guy with an IQ like yours fooling around like this?”; he offered nothing else.
My high school yearbook picture was blurbed “Future plans are undecided.”
In my youth, I suffered from an affliction where I knew that I was going to get away from my small town and, consequently, believed that anyone who remained was at best provincial and at worst an idiot. (Superiority complex? Moi?) So, any advice from teachers or our counselor was filtered though, “And I should take advice from someone teaching HERE??”
I don’t recall any computerized tests. And since I scored off the charts on ACT and SAT (best in my class, best of prior years, etc.), our guidance counselor (a nice enough guy) didn’t have anything meaningful to contribute (“Go to nearby UofM!”). I didn’t want to do that because it would have meant staying at home and commuting, so I went to a state U farther away.
And the rest is…
I got no help from my UK school in 1971 (they didn’t have a guidance counsellor.)
Soon after I did go to a career guidance firm that had a truly massive questionnaire.
When the time came to discuss my answers, the chap said “I’ve never seen such extreme results!”
Apparently most young adults had scores of 60-75% for careers they liked and correspondingly 25-40% for jobs they were less keen on.
Here are some of my preference scores:
- working indoors … 98%
- using mathematics … 97%
- completing projects by myself … 95%
- using logic (as opposed to creativity) … 92%
I was recommended to try:
- actuary
- computing
- accountant
- teaching maths
I asked what would be my ‘worst’ choices and the chap laughingly offered:
- forest ranger
- farming
- tour guide
Happily I got into computing (and later teaching chess!)
I graduated h.s. in 1975. The test told me to go to welding school. I’ve been a master’s prepared librarian for over 40 years…
When I was in business school, I was planning on going into market research, which meant that I was taking additional classes in statistics, which also had a lot of the students who were planning to go into actuarial science.
The actuarial students were an interesting group – almost uniformly, they were choosing actuarial science because:
- It was very numbers-oriented
- It featured a minimal amount of having to interact with co-workers or clients, give presentations, etc.
- It was said to be a particularly low-stress career
That’s funny because when I was in math school, the ActSci majors seemed to have a lot more in common with the business people then they did with the other Mathies. And the career seemed to be a lot higher-stress than the other math departments (lots of memorization required for licensing tests, for example).
I’d say that it was about the same people-orientedness wise, although the people they were oriented towards were different. They were certainly the only ones you’d expect to see in a suit ever.
Did the test 1973-4, don’t remember anything about the results. Friend of mind took it and the career choice that came back was “mortician.” She was mortified.
This, I think, is true – getting certified as an actuary was stressful (I want to say that there was like seven or eight tests that they had to pass), and it’s why they were such grinds when they were in school. My recollection is that, once one did get certified, it was supposed to be a low-stress but good-paying job.
And, I imagine that, compared to peers in the math department, they likely came across a lot more like businesspeople than math nerds. OTOH, in the business school, they were definitely the nerds of the group (even moreso than beancounters accountants).
I took one of these tests in '68 when I was a junior in high school. The only recommendation I remember is Detective. I do enjoy reading and watching mysteries. 
I recall taking some sort of career aptitude test that purported to determine whether an individual was geared best towards dealing with: things, ideas, or people. Naturally, when I took it, my score appeared dead center in the triangle. The counselor showed me this and said “This is great. Looks like you’ll do equally well with whatever you choose to do.” Valuable guidance indeed.
Of the hundred or so auto claim adjusters I’ve known, the one thing we all had in common was entering adulthood with no clear career direction. It’s like the gutter ball of career paths–easy to fall into, nearly impossible to escape, and nobody loves you. Maybe having the student job shadow an adjuster for a couple days will scare him straight.
My kid’s guidance counselor didn’t do any guidance counseling, but he was SUPPOSED to be a resource person.
The problem was that he was even more ADHD than any student, and was famous for telling our kid things like "Hey, looks like there’s an excellent scholarship that’d be perf… oh, the deadline already passed, gosh, that’s too bad…"
I told the kid “Hey, ask him what he wanted to be when he was your age. If the answer isn’t Guidance Counselor, ask him why you should listen to him, if he couldn’t even plan his own career?”
Well, I never saw a guidance counselor in high school because I managed to graduate in three years and skipped out before that appointment ever came up. Good thing really.
But just for a story to counterpose against all the ones above, my daughter, who went to a private prep school, had an excellent guidance counselor. The point of this employee was to make sure that everyone who graduated went on to some kind of college, because that’s what we are paying for, right: prep. There was no talk of anything else (although I’m sure she advised the second-tier students about the easiest alternatives). She said that told my daughter that she could apply to any and every college she wanted, but one had to be a state university and one had to be a women’s college. Her idea was that she knew my daughter, given her scores and GPA, certainly would get into a state U (Berkeley wasn’t allowed to be one, for this purpose), so that would be her fail-safe, and the women’s college was because they are often overlooked excellent choices.
She ended up at Bryn Mawr, which she loved, and which she never would have otherwise considered.
I graduated high school (from a school where most kids were headed to college) in 1984 and I remember the guidance counselors were useful for identifying which colleges to apply to. I applied to five; one safety, two reaches and two in the middle. My brother’s kids graduated from high school in 2012 and 2016 and they didn’t get this kind of advice. (The older kid had good grades and was smart but did horribly on the SAT, so I found a list of schools that were SAT-optional and he went to one on that list, where he did fantastic and is now in grad school for a masters in social work.)
“He likes sheep. He really likes sheep.” 
I graduated in 1969, and our gigantic high school was heavily tracked, so all the kids in my classes were going to college, no career guidance needed. I worked in our college office for two years and there wasn’t a lot of college guidance going on that I noticed.
The guidance counselors in my kids’ high school was more of a hindrance than a help. They were of the opinion that there wasn’t much difference between the local community college and Harvard, and that kids shouldn’t apply to stretch schools to avoid disappointment.
My daughter applied to a program that allowed her to go to Berkeley half time her senior year, and the guidance counselors dragged their feet as much as they could. My wife who worked from home had to go push them. My daughter got in, but was more or less considered a big bother.
So, not too useful.
Interesting. . . the opinions run between ‘abysmal’ to ‘useless/nonexistent’, but the crowd here seems (at least to me) Gen X’ers or older. Are Guidance Counselors not a thing anymore?
Tripler
I don’t have (human) kids, so I don’t know. The cat has no opinion.
When I went to high school in the mid-90s my Guidance Counselor only ever had a single meeting with me and that was part of some “Entire English Class goes to the Counselor Day” for some reason. The GC seemed still mad that apparently her mother had passed 5 years ago and in her will she created a $5,000 College Scholarship to go to the local high school. They posted this scholarship on the wall and the only requirement was that a student had to write a 10 page paper on what their major was going to be and why they thought they needed the money. Apparently after a year nobody actually applied for it and the GC used this as an example of how “lazy” students were becoming now.
I already had my career planned out that didn’t require college (at least not immediately) since I wanted to become someone who worked with computers in the US Army and this seemed to also make the GC mad when she found out, “You’re not applying to college immediately? You’re throwing your life away! What do you plan on doing after high school without college!” I (jokingly) told her I was going to move to Mexico and start a farm since I have family there that owned some farm land. She then stopped talking to me forever.
When I was about 16 or 17, I took the same aptitude test as the OP (and others) described. In my case, it suggested three careers: musician, lawyer, and English teacher.
This resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth from my mother. “You don’t practice your instruments enough to be a professional musician! You don’t have the grades to go to university, much less law school, or even teachers college! What a waste of time and money this test was! You’ll never be a musician, a lawyer, or an English teacher!”
Well, time went by, as it always does; and as I grew older, I found music to be a very pleasant hobby once I got away from my cranky old piano teacher. I ended up learning other instruments (including my voice) and sitting in with a number of ensembles, from stodgy church choirs, to instrumental chamber quartets and quintets, to raucous pub bands. I made it into a bachelor’s program at university, and did so well, that I had the grades for law school; and today, I am a very happy fully-qualified lawyer. And in the years between graduating with my bachelor’s and attending law school for my law degree, I had a great time teaching English at a community college part-time (among other jobs)
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For some, such tests are utter BS, and that’s fine. But for a few, they’re kind of worthwhile–if you can ignore your parents’ refusal to accept the results, as I did. 