Rice Purity Test Average Score by Age and Year
There is no official average Rice Purity Test score — but informal data tells a consistent story. Here's what the numbers actually look like, and why you should take them with a grain of salt.
The first thing to know about Rice Purity Test averages: nobody has them. The test has never been administered as a study, there’s no central scoring database, and every “average” number you’ve ever seen quoted is some combination of campus survey, Reddit thread, and TikTok comment. Take all of the numbers on this page accordingly.
That said, the shape of the data is consistent everywhere it’s been collected, and the shape is more informative than the exact numbers.
What the rough averages look like
The closest thing to a benchmark is the set of self-reported scores from a few hundred student newspapers, Reddit polls, and aggregated screenshots of TikTok results. Stitched together, they paint a consistent picture:
The most useful way to read this table is to ignore the exact numbers and pay attention to the trend: scores fall fast in adolescence, slow down in college, and effectively flatline by your late twenties. Anything else you read about the “average” rice purity score should be measured against that trend, not against the specific numbers.
Averages by year of college
If you’re a student trying to figure out where you stand against your year, the rough informal averages from a half-dozen student paper surveys (mostly between 2018 and 2023) look like this:
- Freshman year: 70–80
- Sophomore year: 65–75
- Junior year: 60–70
- Senior year: 55–65
These are self-reported averages on campuses where the test is part of the culture. The actual averages on campuses where the test isn’t a thing are probably higher, because the people who don’t take the test don’t get counted. That’s the sampling problem in a nutshell.
Averages by gender
The persistent finding in self-reported data is a small but consistent gap: men report slightly lower scores than women in every age band, usually by about 3–6 points. The explanations are debated:
- Reporting differences. Some research on self-disclosure surveys suggests men over-report “yes” answers on questionnaires about risk-taking, while women under-report. If this applies here, the actual gap may be smaller than the reported gap.
- Opportunity differences. Some experiences on the list (e.g., paying for or being paid for sexual experiences) are markedly more common to report among men. Other items show no gender gap at all.
- Question phrasing. The test was written from a particular cultural perspective and doesn’t always read symmetrically. A handful of questions may bias which gender is more likely to answer yes.
The cleanest summary is: the gender gap exists in self-reported data, it’s small, and it probably reflects reporting habits as much as anything else. Don’t over-read it.
Why “average” is the wrong question to ask
The Rice Purity Test isn’t measuring a thing — it’s tallying a list. Two people with identical scores can have had completely different lives. One person’s 65 is “had a wild three months at 18, otherwise quiet,” and another person’s 65 is “moderate experience evenly distributed across ten years.” The score collapses these into the same number.
What this means in practice:
- Comparing your score to an “average” tells you almost nothing about how your experiences compare. It tells you about the count, not the content.
- The same person can score wildly differently if they answer in different moods. People who take the test as a brag bias their answers downward; people who take it as a confession bias upward. The honest middle is unstable.
- The test ages badly. It rewards people who haven’t done much yet and quietly penalises everyone else, even though most of the “yes” answers were perfectly normal life events.
A better question than “what’s the average?” is “what does my distribution of yes answers look like across the categories?” If you can break your “yes” answers down — dating, sex, alcohol, drugs, school, crime — you have something interesting. If all you have is a single number, you have a fun party trick.
A reminder about honesty
The single biggest source of variance in self-reported scores is whether the person is telling the truth. People answer this test very differently in private than in public; the same person can record a 78 in their browser and tell their group chat they scored a 50. This is the main reason the public “average” data is so loose. If you take the test alone, in private, with nobody watching — which is what this site is designed for — you’ll get the most useful number you can get from the exercise. That doesn’t make the number meaningful. It just makes it yours.
If you’d like to take the test now, the main page loads the canonical 100 questions, one at a time, in about seven minutes. Your answers stay in your browser; we don’t save them.