What makes for a good match? The jury is still out on this one. Experiments have been conducted with a variety of approaches to matching students with mentors: teachers have selected mentors for their students, students have selected their own mentors, and a handful of random matches have been made. These experiments have helped to shed light on this issue and show that there are advantages to each approach. When students selected their own mentors, students were often motivated to immediately begin their on-line relationships. These students tended to base their selections of mentors on criteria such as: shared hobbies, career interests, or background information. When teachers selected mentors for students, teachers appeared to consider a wider range of criteria: e.g. mentor's tone as exhibited in their written descriptions of their work in relation to their students' personalities. Random-matching allowed for streamlining the process, but did not ensure that the students would have much in common with their mentors.

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