College Republican Federation of Virginia

During the misery of exam week I often found it more enjoyable to take online quizzes that told me my ideal presidential candidate rather than actually study. I probably took 25 such quizzes. Below are my two favorite quizzes and the worst. To note, the aggregated and weighted candidate who best lines up with my views is Fred Thompson (who I already support).

The Winner: Vote Help
With 28 simple questions presented in a modern, but clean format this non-partisan quiz gives the user the ability to answer questions on a vast number of issues and rank the importance of each issue. The results page is fantastic. It gives the user a clear result, but allows you to go in-depth to see what issues the candidates agreed with you on and provides links to prove it.

Runner Up: Washington Post
The WaPo quiz has 25 issue based questions. The user can rank the importance of each issue. The outstanding and refreshingly unique aspect of the quiz is the answer section. The user selects answers among quotes listed anonymously from the Republican candidates. The reason I could not rank this quiz as number one is because not all quotes are created equal. While this quiz recognized this and instead presented summary statements (full quotes are a click away), the statements can still be vague and the precision I would like to see is perhaps not possible in this format.

The Loser: Select Smart
The outdated presentation of this annoying quiz not only gave me terrible results (my number three candidate was Stephen Colbert), it included spam at the end! This quiz, according to press accolades, was the darling of the 2000 presidential campaign. Since then the owners have apparently decided that instead of upgrading the presentation or the content they would instead made the quiz look as ugly as possible and try to make as much money as they could by loading the page with tons of ads.