We built this Rice Purity Test to give you a fast, private and honest score. Learn about the test origins, our scoring, and our privacy approach.
We built this Rice Purity Test to give you a fast, private and honest score. Learn about the test origins, our scoring, and our privacy approach. This page explains where the test came from, how the scoring works, what your result does and does not mean, and how we handle your information when you use the site.
The Rice Purity Test began at Rice University in Houston, Texas, as a printed checklist that students passed around in the early 1980s. A version of it was published in The Thresher, the student newspaper, in 1983, and it was created as a light-hearted bonding exercise. New students were arriving on campus from very different backgrounds, and the checklist gave everyone a shared, funny way to compare experiences and watch how much changed over their college years.
The idea was never meant to stay in one place. Students who transferred, visited friends, or simply heard about the checklist carried it to other universities, where each campus made it a small tradition of its own. Through the late 1980s and 1990s it spread across the United States as photocopies, dorm-room posters, and eventually early internet pages. When the web took over, the test found its permanent home online, and it has now been taken millions of times by students, graduates, and the simply curious all over the world.
Through all of that, the heart of the test never changed. It is still 100 questions about ordinary and not-so-ordinary life experiences, still scored the same simple way, and still meant to be taken with friends nearby so you can compare results. Our job on this site is to keep that classic format intact and present it in a clean, fast, mobile-friendly form that works the way people expect it to today.
The scoring could not be simpler, and that is deliberate. Your score starts at 100. Every question describes an experience, and for each one you have done, you tick the box and lose one point. If you tick 36 items, your score is 64. There are no weighted questions, no hidden multipliers, and no trick categories. A question about your first kiss counts exactly the same as a question about a wild night, because the test was designed as a rough snapshot, not a precise measurement.
People often ask what the score bands mean, so here is the way most players understand them. Scores from 100 to 85 usually belong to people with a very sheltered path so far, often younger students or people whose lives have simply not crossed the situations on the list yet. Scores from 84 to 60 are the most common range on this site and cover the majority of students and graduates; this is the band where the average result sits, in the mid 60s. Scores from 59 to 45 suggest a fuller social life and more of the classic college experiences. Scores from 44 down to 25 point to a long and varied list, and scores below 25 are rare and usually belong to people who have quite deliberately collected experiences over many years.
None of these bands is a grade. A high score is not innocence rewarded and a low score is not a warning sign. Two people with the same score may have arrived there by completely different roads, and the same person taking the test at eighteen and at thirty will usually see the number move, because life happens. That movement is the point of the test. It is a snapshot of your experiences at one moment, and the fun is in watching the snapshot change.
The Rice Purity Test is entertainment and self-reflection. It is not a medical test, a psychological assessment, a background check, or a measure of character, and no score on this site should ever be used to judge another person. Employers, schools, and partners have no business asking for your score, and if anyone treats it as more than a game, they have misunderstood it in exactly the way its creators never intended.
We also cannot verify anyone's answers, and we do not try. The test runs on the honour system, the way it always has. Answer honestly and the score means something to you. Answer carelessly and it means nothing to anyone. The choice, like the experiences, is yours.
We designed this site so that the test itself needs nothing from you. You do not need an account, a name, or an email address to answer the questions and get your score. When you finish, your final score is stored anonymously, with nothing attached that identifies you, so that we can show honest site-wide statistics such as the average score and the distribution of results. Your individual answers are never published, never sold, and never shared.
Accounts exist only for people who want extra features, such as keeping a history of their results. If you contact us, we keep your message so we can reply, and nothing more. Our full Privacy Policy explains all of this in plain English, because we believe privacy policies should be readable by the people they describe.
We are a small independent team that maintains this site because the test deserves a careful home. We keep the classic 100 questions faithful to the original, fix errors when readers point them out, and publish a journal with the history of the test, guides to understanding scores, and data from the anonymous results the site collects. We read every message sent through the contact page, and reader corrections have genuinely improved the site more than once.
If you spot a problem, disagree with something in the journal, have a question about the test or your score, or want to suggest an improvement, reach us through the Contact page. Tell us what you found and where, and we will look into it. Thank you for keeping a forty-year-old student tradition alive by playing along.