Welcome Message

    Entrusted by the Board of Management of the Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium (PROMS), I’m very much delighted to announce that PROMS2012 will be held on campus of Jiaxing University, Zhejiang Province, P.R.China from August 6-9, 2012 with pre-conference workshops scheduled on 4-5 August, 2012 and post-conference self-arranged events scheduled on 10 August, 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. It is the first time to be held in Jiaxing, China Mainland. Therefore, College of Foreign Studies, Jiaxing University is pround of that and are confident to offer good arrangement to make PROMS2012 more successful.
    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 influrential entrance examintaion 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 the IRT-based software like BILOG, Parscale, Iteman 4 and others to real testing problem solving is confined within an extremely small ‘band’ of people.
    In this sense, I should say PROMS2012 thus 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 will follow the practice of the last PROMS, focusing on recent advances in objective measurement and providing an international forum on both the latest research in using Rasch measurement and non-Rasch practice. I’m sure the pre-conference workshops, parallel sessions, distinguished researchers and practitioners and post-conference self-arranged events will greatly encourage participation and all our participants would definitely share the benefits from it. In particular, I should mention that PROMS 2012 Jiaxing will benefit postgraduate students from developing countries and researchers who seek to use the Rasch Measurement in their research activities.
    By the way, Jiaxing is a beautiful city in the Southern part of China Mainland. Here the lake, the bridge, the pavilion, the pagoda, the food, the people are inviting!
    We look forward to meeting you on our campus!

Contact Email: proms2012_reg@hotmail.com
Organizing Committee PROMS2012, Jiaxing, China