Matching questions require students to match items from two columns. There are two ways to create matching questions in Respondus. First, the instructor may specify matching pairs for both the left and right columns--specifically, the correct match for the left column must be placed in the field immediately to the right. If this procedure is followed, it is not necessary to indicate the correct answer in the small column located at the far left. 

The second approach for creating matching questions allows items in the right column to be placed in any order, but requires the correct answer for the match to be indicated in the small column located at the far left. This approach is especially suited for questions in which a long list of items (e.g., country names) is being matched to a relatively short list of items (e.g., type of government). For example, the left list might contain 20 countries (Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, etc.) while the list on the right might display four types of government (Multi-Party Democracy, One-Party Regime, Military/Monarchical/Theocratic Regime, Disordered State). Instead of entering the type of government for each country, you can simply enter the letter of the correct answer in front of the country name. See the table below.

In a matching question, most learning management systems display the contents of the left column in the order the information was entered. The answers in the right column are generally scrambled. (Note: it is possible to place extra answers in the right column. In this situation, the extra answers act as decoys and do not match any of the answers in the left column).

Tip: The easiest way to navigate through the answer choices is to use the PageUp and PageDown keys.  

All answer choices are equally weighted with matching questions. So if a question has 10 matches, each match is worth 10%.