The Rice Purity Test.

The Rice Purity Test is a self-administered survey of one hundred yes-or-no questions. You start at one hundred. For every experience you’ve had, you subtract a point. Whatever you have left when you reach question one hundred is your score — a single number that’s supposed to summarise, in the bluntest possible way, how much of a particular kind of life you’ve already lived.

It’s not subtle. That’s the point. The list was written by Rice University freshmen in 1924, when “subtle” wasn’t really on the syllabus. A century later it’s a TikTok ritual, a group-chat icebreaker, and a low-stakes confession for anyone who wants to compare notes without actually saying the words out loud.

What the test actually measures

Strictly speaking, the Rice Purity Test measures one thing: how many of these one hundred experiences you’ve had. That’s it. It doesn’t measure morality, maturity, character, or future success. There is no causal relationship between your score and anything important about you.

But the reason it’s stuck around for a hundred years isn’t the scoring system — it’s the list. Reading through the questions is itself an exercise. You’ll find yourself remembering things you hadn’t thought about in years; you’ll see someone you used to be; you’ll catch yourself laughing at the absurdity of equating a first kiss with a night in jail. The test works because the questions are good prompts, not because the score is meaningful.

That’s also why the score is shareable. A number is portable. A list of experiences isn’t.

How the scoring works, exactly

There’s nothing clever happening. Every yes costs you one point. The maximum is one hundred (you’ve had none of the experiences), and the theoretical minimum is zero (you’ve had all of them).

A score of 100 is sometimes called Untouched. 95–100 is the Innocent tier — a sheltered childhood, a quiet adolescence. 80–94 is the broad Curious middle, where most American high-school seniors land. 50–79 is Experienced, the most common landing zone for college upperclassmen. 20–49 is Wild, and anything below twenty is jokingly called Off the Charts. We unpack each of these in the score guide, with worked examples of what kinds of life experiences typically lead to each band.

The single most useful thing to know is that the test does not weight any question more heavily than another. The point you lose for holding hands is the same point you lose for being arrested. That’s not a bug — it’s the reason the test is so simple to take and so unreliable as a moral instrument. It’s a tally, not a verdict.

Where the number actually comes from

The Rice Purity Test was first printed on a paper handout in the mid-1920s for incoming freshmen at Rice University in Houston. It was meant as a conversation starter for dorm hallways — a fast, slightly scandalous way to introduce strangers to each other in an era when introducing yourself to strangers was a more delicate operation than it is now.

The numbered hundred-question form solidified some time in the 1960s. By the late 1980s the test had crossed into broader student culture in the United States: photocopies travelled between universities, then between schools, then onto early bulletin board systems and Geocities pages. The first website with the title “The Rice Purity Test” appeared around 1998. TikTok rediscovered it in 2020 as part of the “what’s your score?” trend, which is roughly the moment the test went from regional to global. Our origins page covers the timeline in more detail, including Ann Landers’s adjacent “Innocence Test” of the late 1950s and what made the test specifically catch on at Rice.

Why it’s worth taking once

Read once, the test gives you a number. Read twice — slowly — it gives you a kind of accidental autobiography. You’ll notice the experiences clustering: which decade most of your “yeses” come from, what categories you’ve completely skipped, which ones you’d quietly like to swap. Most people who do the test in good faith say the same thing afterwards: the number itself was less interesting than the act of going through the list.

A few practical things, since people always ask:

• Your answers stay on your device. We don’t transmit, store, or analyse a single answer. Every question is rendered and counted in your browser. If you close the tab, the answers go with it — except that we save your position in your browser’s local storage so you can pick up where you left off.
• The test has nothing to do with sex, specifically. Roughly a third of the questions involve some form of intimacy, but the other two thirds cover drugs, alcohol, school misconduct, minor crimes, and the strange grey area between mischief and self-discovery. People who skim it and call it a “sex quiz” haven’t actually read it.
• You can retake it as many times as you want. Some people retake it once a year as a kind of low-effort journal entry. There’s a button at the end of the results.

A note on tone: this is a static, self-graded test, not a social experiment. We’re not collecting your score, not benchmarking you against anyone, not selling your data, and not asking for an email. We made this because the existing versions of the test online are ad-stuffed, slow, and look like they were designed in 2006. If you want a more playful, character-based take, our friends at QuizPanda host a shorter rice purity quiz that returns a personality archetype instead of a numeric score.

The rest of the heavy lifting is up to you. Press Begin Assessment, answer one hundred yes-or-no questions, and the file closes itself.