Rice Purity Test History: What Really Happened Since 1924

Most sites that host the quiz tell rice purity test history in a single sentence: it was created at Rice University in 1924 as an icebreaker for freshman orientation week. It's a tidy story. It's also mostly wrong.

What happened in 1924 was a survey. The Rice Thresher, Rice's student newspaper, ran a piece titled "Rice Girls Not Quite Half Bad" on March 7, 1924, built on 10 questions put to 119 female students. Nothing in the record ties it to orientation. The O-Week ritual, the 100 one-point questions and the version you'd take on our free Rice Purity Test all arrived decades later, in fits and starts, with a surprising amount of arguing along the way.

I ran orientation programs for eleven years and heard the icebreaker line repeated as fact more than once. Here is what the record shows, drawn mostly from the Thresher's own 2017 reporting and the sources gathered in Wikipedia's "Purity test" article.

What the original rice purity test actually was

The original rice purity test was a 10-question survey, each question worth 10 points, answered by 119 women at Rice in 1924. Their average score was 62. It was a newspaper feature with a tally at the end, not a party game, and there's no evidence it was handed out during orientation.

Three of its questions are known today. "Have you ever been drunk?" drew only 4 yeses out of 119. "Have you ever cheated?" drew 58. And "Have you ever been engaged and broken it?" tells you exactly which decade you're in. Only the first two survive, in some form, in the modern test (they're items 46 and 35 on our list of all 100 questions).

That drinking number makes sense once you remember 1924 fell in the middle of Prohibition. Being drunk was the scandal. Cheating, apparently, was not, though the question never said if it meant a fiancé or an exam.

Who created the rice purity test?

No single person. The sources I trust don't credit an author for the 1924 piece. The test people know was built in layers by Thresher staff: the Backpage writers of the 1988 version, whoever revised it by 1998, and the 2012 Backpage editors, Anthony Lauriello among them, who wrote today's official version.

Rice purity test timeline, 1924 to today

The short version: a 1924 survey, a long quiet stretch, a 1988 rebuild into 100 questions, a 2012 rewrite that became the official test, then a second life online. Here are the dated events I can source.

Source: Rice Thresher, "Purity Test evolves, spreads beyond Rice" (August 23, 2017); Wikipedia, "Purity test" and the primary sources it cites. TikTok row: The Independent's coverage of the trend.

Notice the gap. Between 1924 and 1988 the Rice test barely registers. Purity tests didn't vanish, though: Joselin Linder's research for her 2009 book traces online circulation back to roughly 1980, the Usenet era. Rice's version just wasn't the famous one yet.

Rice purity test history: how 10 questions became 100

The jump came in 1988, when the Thresher's Backpage ran a 100-question version worth one point per item instead of ten questions worth ten. That structure is the one everyone takes today, though the wording has been rebuilt at least twice since.

The 1988 list had a sense of humor. Its rule, "If you don't understand the question, add two points", rewarded confusion with purity. It also had blind spots. It said "MOS", member of the opposite sex, as if no gay student would ever pick it up, and it included questions about sexual crimes. By 1998 the rape and molestation items were gone and MOS had become MPS, Member of the Preferred Sex. Item 69 was already a bare "?".

The 2008 version went cruder, finishing on skipping the hand-washing after the restroom. After the 2011 refusal came the 2012 rewrite the official site still carries.

Why is it called the rice purity test?

Because it comes from Rice University in Houston, named for its founder William Marsh Rice, and specifically from Rice's student paper. The rice has nothing to do with the grain. Every rice pun on this site (our score bands run from Uncooked rice down to Tahdig) is our own doing.

The O-Week argument nobody outside Rice hears about

Rice students have fought about using the test in orientation for at least two decades. One college's O-Week banned it in 2005. Backpage editors refused to run it in 2011, then rewrote it in 2012. Jones College banned it from O-Week in 2017, the same year Will Rice advisors folded it into their Healthy Relationships talk.

The 2005 ban came after a coordinator said the test could amount to sexual harassment, which, if you picture nervous 18-year-olds reading items aloud on their third day of college, is not a wild claim. The 2012 editors, by contrast, wrote a new test so O-Week groups would stop pulling older, more biased versions off the internet.

Here's my contrarian take, from someone who ran these programs. The bans get the headlines, but the rewrite did more good. Students take the test whatever a coordinator says; I watched it happen in dorm lounges every fall. A cleaner version was harm reduction. Will Rice's approach, raising it in a Healthy Relationships session and saying outright that it is not a checklist, is the framing I used too.

The criticism continues. A 2024 student op-ed in The Trail argued the test promotes sexism, racism and moralistic puritanism, and Her Campus pieces such as "Shaming the Rice Purity Test" argued it invites judgment.

Is the official Rice Purity Test from Rice University?

Partly. The official test lives at ricepuritytest.com and belongs to the Rice Thresher, Rice University's student newspaper, whose logo sits on the page. Rice University itself, the institution, doesn't write or run it, and some of its residential colleges have kept it out of orientation entirely.

That page is what people mean by the rice purity test original website. It says the test helped Rice students move from O-Week into college life, lists 100 items with number 69 left blank, and jokes that it is not a bucket list, since completing every item would likely be fatal. It offers no explanation of scores. In 2017 the Thresher reported that the test site earned the paper more than its own news website.

To be clear about us: this site isn't affiliated with Rice or the Thresher. To tell an honest copy from a sketchy one, see our guide on whether the Rice Purity Test is safe.

How it spread beyond Rice

By 2017 the test belonged to people who had never set foot on campus. The official page logged 1,524,204 visits in the year before August 2017, and its top city wasn't Houston. It was Atlanta, followed by Houston, Dallas, Chicago and New York.

Rice still had its moment. On "Dis-Orientation" day 2017, the Saturday after O-Week, tests taken in Houston jumped to 274 from about 100 on a typical day, with an average score of 65. That 65 is one city on one day, a crowd of brand-new college students, so treat it carefully; our page on the rice purity test average score explains why so few sourced averages exist.

The next wave came in the early 2020s, when Gen Z rediscovered the test on TikTok and posting your score became its own trend, one The Independent covered. Group chats filled with screenshots of a test written for college students and adults.

Older than Rice's version: the wider purity-test family

Rice's 1924 survey is the oldest dated example I can source, but purity tests turned up on other campuses through the 1930s with no sign they came from Houston. Barnard had one in 1935, Toronto in 1936, Indiana in 1939, and Caltech later had its own "Official Purity Test".

The Barnard test ran in Columbia's humor magazine, The Jester, and the October 1935 issue was briefly censored. Toronto's had 20 questions and docked marks for smoking, drinking and kissing. Indiana's "Virtue Test" and the Caltech test were later reprinted by folklorists Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter in their 1975 book "Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded", which treated purity tests as a folklore genre they called "questionnaire parody". Linder's book stretched the format to 2,000 questions and dates the first web-based purity test to 1994. Wikipedia's "Purity test" article is the best quick map, and our page on other purity test versions goes deeper on each.