Provenance · Reviewed 2026-07-26
Is there an official Rice Purity Test?
Short answer: no. There is no authoritative published edition, no rights holder maintaining one, and no website that can honestly claim to be it — including this one. Here is what the sources actually establish, and what "official" is doing in the many sites that use the word.
What the sources establish
Two Rice-affiliated sources carry the documented history. Rice University's Woodson Research Center catalogue lists an archival object titled "Purity Test, 1990s", which establishes a Rice-associated record in that decade. The Rice Thresher, the university's student newspaper, published an account in 2017 of the test evolving and spreading beyond Rice.
Read together, those two sources support a checklist that circulated, changed, and was copied — not a single fixed edition maintained by anyone. The archival entry does not establish an author, a creation date, or canonical wording, and the Thresher's account of evolution actively argues against the idea that one modern version is the original.
This site is independent
PurityTest.io is not operated by, endorsed by, or affiliated with Rice University. It publishes an independent browser-based version of a 100-item checklist and cites Rice-affiliated sources only to explain the documented history.
We do not describe this site as official anywhere, because the word would not be true. What we can say is specific and checkable: the full question set is published, the scoring is one point per item with no weighting, the calculation happens in your browser, and no population statistic is published without a named source, a collection window, and a method.
Why "official" is a marketing word here
A claim of officialness normally means one of three things: the publisher created the work, the publisher holds the rights to it, or a body with authority over it has endorsed the publisher. None of the three is available for this checklist. Nobody is known to have created the circulating version, no rights are asserted over it, and Rice University endorses no website.
What the word does do is win clicks. A search result promising the official version reads as more trustworthy than one that does not, which is why so many sites use it and why several of them also publish population averages and percentiles with no sample size, collection window, or method attached. The two habits tend to travel together.
How circulating versions actually differ
These are the differences that change what a score means, which is the practical reason the question of an official version matters at all.
Item wording
Different sites phrase the same item differently — "Kissed a non-family member" appears elsewhere as "Kissed someone", and several sexual items are reworded to be more or less explicit. A reworded item still costs one point, so the totals stay comparable in form but not in substance.
Item order
Most versions preserve the rough escalation from social items to sexual, substance, legal, and academic ones, but the exact positions drift. That is why "question 69" or "question 99" does not reliably name the same item across two sites.
Which items survive
Item 38, which asks about a partner of a different race, and item 70, which asks about dating without a chaperone, are dropped by several modern versions as dated. Removing an item changes what a given score represents even though the scale still runs 0 to 100.
Modern additions
Items about explicit digital photos and messages, being nude in a photo, and meeting a partner online cannot predate the internet. Their presence is the clearest evidence that the circulating list has been revised repeatedly rather than preserved intact.
You can compare directly: this site publishes all 100 items with an explanation for each and a printable copy of the full list.
What to check instead of the word "official"
- Is the full question set published, so you can see what you are being scored against?
- Does it state how the score is calculated, and does every item carry the same weight?
- If it publishes an average or a percentile, does it disclose sample size, collection window, and method? Almost none do.
- Does it say what happens to your answers, and does it require an account or an email to show your result?
- Does it carry a review date, so you know which version of the list you took?
Our answers to all five are on the methodology page.