What does a Rice Purity Test score of 100 mean?

A score of 100 means you answered "no" to every single one of the hundred questions — including the very mild ones like "have you ever held hands romantically?" In practice, almost nobody scores a 100 past the age of about fourteen. It's the maximum possible value, not the expected one.

What's the average Rice Purity Test score?

Self-reported averages from college campuses tend to cluster around 60 for upperclassmen and 75 for freshmen, but the test is unscientific and the samples are heavily self-selected. Treat any "average" you see online as anecdotal. We have more on this in the average score guide .

What's considered a low Rice Purity Test score?

Anything below 40 is generally considered low, and below 20 is sometimes labeled "Off the Charts." A low score doesn't mean anything bad about you as a person — it just means you've answered yes to a lot of questions, which can happen at any age and for any number of reasons.

Is a higher Rice Purity Test score better?

No. The test wasn't designed with a "better" outcome in mind. A high score signals fewer of the listed experiences; a low score signals more of them. That's a description, not a ranking. People who treat it as a leaderboard in either direction are missing the joke.

Rice Purity Test Score Meaning — Full Guide (2026)

Your Rice Purity Test score is a number between 0 and 100. The number, in itself, doesn’t tell you anything important. What gives it texture is the tier it falls into — the rough band that a hundred years of informal scoring tradition has settled on.

This is the canonical breakdown that circulated on college campuses long before any of this was on the internet. The boundaries are loose. People have argued the exact thresholds since the 1960s. The version below is the one we use on this site, and it lines up with the cultural understanding that’s reflected on Reddit, TikTok, and the Rice University student paper.

The six tiers, end to end

98–100

Untouched · "Pure"

A protected childhood, very little contact with the categories the test asks about. Most people who score in this band are young (often 13–16) and aren't lying. Older Pures usually have a very specific, intentional reason for their lifestyle.

94–97

Sweetly Innocent

A handful of mild experiences — a first kiss, a small white lie, a sip of champagne at a wedding. The clean side of the bell curve. Common among American high-school underclassmen.

80–93

Romantically Curious

You've had relationships, you've stayed out past curfew, you've made a few decisions you might quietly edit out of family conversation. This is where most American freshmen actually land — the broad middle of the typical sample.

50–79

Lived A Little

The median for college upperclassmen. Enough experience to have stories at brunch, none of which need footnotes. Most people who self-identify as "average" on this test fall somewhere in this band.

20–49

Spectacularly Reckless

You've taken the chances, taken the calls, and walked home in someone else's clothes. The receipts are doing the heavy lifting. Common among twenty-somethings whose college years were, by their own description, "a lot."

0–19

Off The Charts · "Outlaw"

Either you've genuinely lived three lifetimes already, or your honesty setting was generous. Either way, the people in this band tend to be the ones the rest of the group chat is curious about. Approach the number with a sense of humour.

What the test isn’t measuring

The tier names are tongue-in-cheek for a reason. The Rice Purity Test does not, in any meaningful sense, measure:

Sexual experience specifically. Roughly a third of the questions involve some form of physical intimacy, but the other two thirds are about substances, school behaviour, minor crimes, and the absurd grey area between mischief and self-discovery. Two people with identical scores can have completely different “yes” patterns.
Maturity. A 22-year-old can score 100 if they grew up in a sheltered environment, and a 16-year-old can score in the 60s if they’ve had a particularly eventful adolescence. Maturity correlates with neither end.
Morality. The test does not weight a felony differently from a first kiss. Treating it as a moral instrument is roughly as useful as treating a thermometer as a barometer.
Risk-taking. People with low scores aren’t reliably more reckless than people with high scores. They might just have had different opportunities.

Most people who interpret their score as a verdict on themselves are doing more work than the test was ever designed to support. It’s a tally, not a diagnosis.

What your score actually correlates with

In informally collected samples, Rice Purity Test scores correlate most reliably with three things:

Age. Older people tend to have had more of the listed experiences. The downward drift of scores from age 14 to age 25 is the single strongest pattern in any self-reported data.
Cultural background. Students from regions with stricter dating, drinking, or substance norms tend to score higher on average. The test was written by 1920s Texans and reflects that worldview.
Truth-telling habits. The biggest source of variance, by far, is whether people answer honestly. People who treat the test as a brag tend to bias their answers downward; people who treat it as a confession tend to bias upward. There is no neutral position.

If you want to compare your score to others honestly, look at the average score guide, which breaks down what people in different age brackets typically report.

Score versus tier — which one matters more?

For sharing purposes, people quote the score. (“I got a 73.”) For interpretation, the tier is more honest, because it accounts for the fact that a single point either way is rarely meaningful. The difference between 67 and 68 is a single experience, often a trivial one. The difference between tiers — between Experienced and Wild, for example — is usually a cluster of experiences in a similar category, which is the actual information.

When someone tells you their score, ask them what tier it puts them in instead. It tends to lead to a more honest conversation than the bare number does.

A note on retaking the test

The score is not permanent and the test isn’t a one-shot. People take it once at sixteen and once at twenty-two and watch the number fall, the way some people keep a height pencil mark on a doorframe. It’s a reasonable use of the test — it’s also a reminder that the score is descriptive, not prescriptive.

If you want to try the test now, the main page loads the full 100 questions and gives you a private score in about seven minutes. There’s no sign-up and nothing is sent anywhere.