About Rice Purity Tester
I’m Tessa Marlow. For eleven years I worked in residence life and orientation at two US universities: running move-in weekends, training the upperclass students who lead first-year groups, and sitting in on more late-night dorm-lounge conversations than I can count. The Rice Purity Test came up in almost every one of those years. Sometimes it was a laugh that broke the ice. Sometimes it was the thing a quiet student brought to my office a week later because a number had been passed around the floor group chat.
That is why this site exists. Most versions of the test online are a hundred checkboxes, a number, and a page of copy that repeats the same unsourced story. I wanted a version that treats the test the way I learned to treat it with students: as a fun mirror of experiences, explained honestly, with your privacy taken seriously.
What this site promises
Your answers stay in your browser. The score is worked out on your own device. Nothing you tick is sent to a server, and there is no account, no email box and no “enter your email to see your result” step. The only thing that can ever leave your device is a score plus an age range, and only if you press the button that adds them to our anonymous live stats. You can read exactly how that works in the privacy policy and on our page about whether the test is safe.
Facts come with sources. The history on this site comes from the Rice Thresher’s own reporting and from published books, not from the copy-pasted origin story. Where real data does not exist, such as a credible average score by age, we say so instead of inventing one.
The score means what it measures, nothing more. The 100 items follow the order and scope of the Thresher’s current test, so your number lines up with the official page. The wording is our own, with plain-English hints for the slang. The score bands, from “Uncooked rice” to “Tahdig”, are my reading of the scale, and they are labelled that way everywhere they appear.
What I’ve seen the test do
In a typical orientation group, the test goes one of two ways. Either everyone shares, laughs at item 69, and realises nobody actually cares about anyone else’s number, or one person’s score gets turned into a nickname that follows them for a semester. The difference is almost never the test. It is whether the group treats the score as a story or as a ranking. If you take away one thing from this site, take that: you never owe anyone your score, and nobody’s number tells you who they are.
Who it’s for. The test asks about sex, drugs and the law, and it was written for college students. This site is for adults 18 and over.
Independent, and not affiliated with Rice
Rice Purity Tester is an independent site. It is not run by, endorsed by or connected to Rice University or the Rice Thresher. The official version lives on the Thresher’s own page. We use the name “Rice Purity Test” to describe the test you are taking, the same way everyone else does.
Contact
Found a mistake, a broken link, or a question whose wording confuses you? Email hello@ricepurity-tester.com. I read everything, and corrections get credited in the page they fix.
Ready? Take the Rice Purity Test, then read what your score means.