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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.
