The History of the Rice Purity Test

The Rice Purity Test is about a century older than TikTok. It started as a student-newspaper survey at Rice University in Houston, spent decades as a campus in-joke, moved onto the early internet, and then became one of the most shared quizzes of the social-media era.

Timeline

1. 1924The Thresher, Rice University’s student newspaper, prints the results of an informal ten-question survey of 119 undergraduate women. Their average score was 62.
2. 1930sSimilar "purity" and "virtue" tests appear at other colleges, including Barnard, the University of Toronto and Indiana University.
3. 1980sThe Thresher keeps revisiting the idea, often on its satirical back page, and the lists grow much longer; one 1988 version runs to 150 questions.
4. 1990sText versions circulate online, and the first web-based purity test appears in 1994.
5. 2017The Thresher reports that its own online version had been visited more than 1.5 million times in a year, with test takers far beyond Houston.
6. 2020sA 100-question version becomes a TikTok trend; in July 2022 The Independent explained the craze among Gen Z users.

The campus era

Rice is a small, residential university where new students live and eat together in close-knit colleges. A questionnaire that everyone fills out and then compares is a natural icebreaker in that setting, and the student paper leaned into it. The Thresher printed and reprinted versions over the years, usually in a joking tone: “purity” was never meant as a moral verdict.

The questions changed with the times. Early versions asked about things like dancing and drinking; later lists grew to cover dating, sex, drugs and trouble with the law, and became far longer than the 100 items most people know today. According to the Thresher, two questions from 1924 have survived: whether you have ever cheated and whether you have ever been drunk. In 1924, 58 of the 119 women said they had cheated, and only four said they had ever been drunk.

Going online

Purity tests were being passed around online well before the web, and the first web-based version appeared in 1994. Websites that scored your answers automatically changed how people took the test: a campus ritual done in a group became something you could do alone, out of curiosity, and then choose whether to share.

Versions multiplied. Sites edited, added and removed items, so the “Rice” test became one version among many. The list on this site is based on the widely circulated 100-question version with gender-neutral wording and three items replaced; the questions page explains exactly what changed.

The TikTok era

Social media gave the test scale. In the early 2020s, videos of people revealing their scores spread on TikTok, and the 100-question version reached an audience far beyond college campuses. Scores became semi-public, which produced a different kind of conversation: reactions, comparisons and arguments about what a “normal” score is.

That's also when the test's audience got younger. Because the questions are about sex, drugs and the law, this site is for adults only.

Why it has lasted

Most quizzes disappear within a few years. This one keeps coming back because of what it enables: an easy, low-stakes way to talk about experiences that are usually private. A number opens the conversation without anyone having to lead with the most sensitive part of their story.

Each new group of students rediscovers it for the same reason the first ones enjoyed it: it's a shared joke with just enough truth in it to be interesting.

Sources: the March 7, 1924 issue of the Thresher (Rice University Digital Collections); the Rice Thresher's 2017 article “Purity Test evolves, spreads beyond Rice”, for the 1924 average and the 2017 visit count; The Independent, July 11, 2022; and Wikipedia, “Purity test” for the 1930s, 1988 and 1994 dates.