What is a purity test?
A purity test is a self-graded survey of yes-or-no questions about "worldly" experiences. You lose a point for each one you have done, and what is left, usually out of 100, is your purity score.
How a purity test works
- Yes or no. Each question asks whether you have ever done something.
- Points off. Each yes costs points. In the modern Rice test every item costs one point out of 100.
- Mild to far. Most tests order the questions from everyday (holding hands) to rare.
- Self-scored. Nobody checks your answers, which is why honesty is the biggest variable.
Wikipedia describes the genre as a self-graded survey of a person's supposed innocence in worldly matters, usually scored as a percentage, with 100 the most pure and 0 the least[1].
Where purity tests come from
The oldest one we can source is the Rice Thresher's ten-question survey of 119 women students in 1924[2]. Others followed at Barnard (1935), Toronto (1936) and Indiana (1939), and folklorists later collected them as a form of "questionnaire parody"[1]. They moved online from around 1980, and the first web-based purity test appeared in 1994[1][3]. Every purity test we can source.
What a purity score measures
Only a count. A purity test cannot weigh one experience against another or say anything about character. One of the editors who wrote the 2012 Rice version asked what "purity" even means in that context[4]. Is the test accurate?
Purity tests you can take here
Frequently asked questions
What is a purity test?
A self-graded list of yes-or-no questions about experiences such as dating, sex, alcohol, drugs and rule-breaking. You lose points for what you have done; the higher the score, the more "pure" by the test's definition.
What is the most famous purity test?
The Rice Purity Test, from the Rice Thresher at Rice University in Houston.
What does purity mean in a purity test?
Only how many of the listed things you have not done. It is a joke measure, not a moral one.
Ready? Take the Rice Purity Test. Your answers never leave your device.
Sources
- "Purity test", Wikipedia, read 2 October 2026. Used for the purity tests outside Rice (1935 to 2009) and their references. Link
- Emily Abdow, "Purity Test evolves, spreads beyond Rice", The Rice Thresher, 23 August 2017. Link
- Joselin Linder, The Purity Test: Your Filth and Depravity Cheerfully Exposed, Macmillan, 2009.
- Anthony Lauriello, "Release of new purity test long overdue", The Rice Thresher, 17 August 2012. Link