Entrusted by the Board of Management of the Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium (PROMS)
PROMS2012 is held in Jiaxing China from August 6-9 2012. Over the past years PROMS has been
hosted in many parts of the Pacific Rim in Singapore Malaysia Hong Kong Taiwan and Tokyo
which has greatly promoted the research of and contributed to the development of Rasch Model in
one way or another. As early as in 1980s the ideas and concepts regarding IRT was first
introduced into China by Prof. Gui Shichun my Ph.D supervisor and it is Prof. Gui who first
conducted with great success the ten-year long (1990-1999) Equating Project for Matriculation
English Test (MET) in China. MET is the most influential entrance examination for higher
education administered annually to over 3.3 million candidates then. The Equating Project won
recognition by Charles Alderson and other foreign counterparts during 1990s. Academically
those were Good Old Days for Chinese testing experts and psychometricians. Then for certain
reasons the equating practice abruptly discontinued. Therefore in China nowadays the
application of IRT-based software like BILOG Parscale Iteman 4 and others to real testing
problem solving is confined to an extremely small 'band' of people. In this sense PROMS2012
meets an important need in that it provides an excellent introduction of IRT and its
application. And anyone who is seriously interested in research and development in the field of
psychometrics or language testing will find such a symposium and related workshops to be an
excellent source of information about the application of Rasch Model. PROMS2012 focuses on
recent advances in objective measurement and provides an international forum on both the latest
research in using Rasch measurement and non-Rasch practice.
