Origins of the Rice Purity Test

The Rice Purity Test is older than the radio in most American living rooms. It’s older than commercial broadcast television. It’s older than the existence of the word “teenager” as it’s commonly used today. It’s also, despite a hundred years of circulation, surprisingly hard to find in any official archive — the early printings were mimeographed pamphlets passed between dorms, not catalogued in libraries. What we know about its history is stitched together from oral testimony, alumni magazines, and a small archive at Rice University’s residential college system.

This is the best reconstruction we have.

1924, Houston: a paper handout

Rice University in Houston, Texas, opened in 1912 as a small, well-funded private institution with strong residential college traditions imported from Oxford and Cambridge. By the early 1920s the college system was running its own orientation programmes for incoming freshmen — and somewhere in the middle of the decade, one or more colleges began handing out a “Purity Test” as part of the orientation week activities.

The earliest verifiable copy is a mimeographed handout from around 1924, with around forty questions on what the test calls “the experiences of a normal college man.” (The test was originally administered only to male students; the female colleges adopted their own versions by the late 1930s.) The format was already recognisable: a list of yes-or-no questions, with the implicit scoring system that everyone starts at the question count and subtracts a point for every “yes.”

The handouts were not subtle. Mid-1920s Rice was, like most of the American South, a deeply Protestant institution with strict ideas about student behaviour. The Purity Test was simultaneously a serious cultural artefact and a tongue-in-cheek piece of orientation humour — a way of asking new students “how much have you done?” in a format that could be laughed off if anyone asked.

1940s–1950s: the slow growth from forty to one hundred

The original 40-ish question pamphlet expanded over the next thirty years. Each decade’s revision added questions about whatever the era found scandalous: drinking and dancing in the 1930s, smoking and dating in the 1940s, “petting” and movie-going in the 1950s. By the early 1960s the test had grown to about seventy questions.

This was also when the test first started to travel. The Rice version was photocopied (a much easier operation than mimeographing) and carried home by students who’d grown up elsewhere. Versions of the test started appearing at other Texas universities, then at universities across the American South, then nationally. Most of them retained the “Rice” name as a kind of folk attribution.

1957: the Ann Landers detour

In November 1957, the newspaper columnist Ann Landers published an “Innocence Test” in her syndicated advice column. The Innocence Test was shorter — about thirty yes-or-no questions — and softer in scope: it asked about dating, kissing, and social behaviour, but largely avoided the substance-use and minor-crime categories that the Rice test had been building out for thirty years.

The Innocence Test ran independently of the Rice version but became, for many readers, the first “purity test” they ever took. For the next two decades, “the purity test” in American public consciousness usually meant Landers’s version, not Rice’s. The two traditions ran in parallel — the Rice version inside college campuses, the Landers version in newspaper households — without much cross-pollination.

The Rice tradition eventually won the naming battle, partly because the Rice version grew into the hundred-question format that was easier to remember, and partly because Landers retired the Innocence Test from her column in the early 1980s.

1986: the modern 100-question canon

The version of the Rice Purity Test that most people now recognise was codified in the mid-1980s. The exact date is contested — some Rice alumni date it to 1985, others to 1986 or 1987 — but the consensus is that the current canonical list was written by a group of student editors at one of Rice’s residential colleges (Brown College, by most accounts) and printed in a residential college handbook in 1986.

The 1986 version made three lasting changes:

1. It standardised the test at exactly 100 questions, so the score read as a percentage.
2. It expanded the substance-use and minor-crime categories, reflecting the campus reality of the mid-1980s.
3. It added explicit questions about sexual behaviour, which earlier versions had been more euphemistic about.

This is the version that travelled through American college culture for the next decade and a half, and the version that eventually crossed over into the internet age.

1998: the first web version

The first known web-hosted version of the Rice Purity Test was published on a Geocities-style page in 1998, by a Rice University student associated with one of the residential colleges. The page presented the 100 questions as checkboxes and computed a score in JavaScript — one of the earliest interactive quizzes on the consumer web.

Within two years, the test had been republished on dedicated quiz hosting sites. By 2003 it had its own dedicated domain. The early web version was identical to the 1986 print version, with no meaningful edits to the questions.

For about fifteen years, the online Rice Purity Test had a steady but unspectacular life: it surfaced in dorm-room conversations every September, made it onto roommate-bonding posts, and slowly accumulated a cultural footprint. The version most people took online between 2005 and 2020 was the same 1986 canon, on the same plain-HTML pages that had been hosting it for two decades.

2020: the TikTok ignition

The Rice Purity Test went viral on TikTok in late 2020, during the second wave of pandemic lockdowns. The format that worked was simple: a creator would film themselves taking the test, occasionally cutting to react to specific questions, and reveal their score at the end. The reveal-and-react format suited the platform perfectly.

Three things made the test work specifically on TikTok:

• The list itself was content. Every question was a potential reaction shot. Creators didn’t need to write a script.
• The score was an honest brag without specifics. A user could say “I got a 47” without specifying which boxes they’d ticked. Plausible deniability is a TikTok superpower.
• It scaled across friend groups. Once one person on a friend group took the test, the rest were obligated to compare. The test had found its native distribution mechanism.

By spring 2021, the test had gone from a regional college tradition to a global ritual, taken by students in dozens of countries who had no particular connection to Rice or Houston. It’s stayed at that volume ever since.

Where the test is now

A hundred years after the original mimeograph, the Rice Purity Test is one of the most consistently taken self-administered tests on the consumer web. Search interest, by Google Trends, has stayed remarkably steady since the 2020 TikTok moment — somewhere in the range of three quarters of a million monthly searches in the United States alone, with consistent secondary peaks in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany.

The test is also somewhat trapped in time. The 100 questions still reflect the priorities of mid-1980s American college students. There are no questions about social media, dating apps, online relationships, remote work, or any of the categories that have come to dominate young adult life since the canon was set. Various groups have tried to write “updated” versions over the years; none of them have stuck. The 1986 canon is the canon, partly out of inertia, partly because the bluntness is part of the test’s charm.

The version on this site is faithful to the 1986 canon, lightly edited only where the original 1980s phrasing would now read as ambiguous. If you want to see exactly what’s on the test, the full question list shows every question in order. The main page lets you take the test one question at a time, with a private score at the end.

A hundred years of self-graded confession, distilled into a single number. That’s the Rice Purity Test.