About Us

What This Site Is

Rice Purity Scores is a small website built around one very old, very simple idea: a list of 100 things a person might have done, and a score at the end that says how many of them are still ahead of you. That list is the Rice Purity Test. It has been passed around student dorms for roughly a century, first on paper and later on screens, and our job here is a modest one — keep a clean, working copy of it online, explain honestly what the score does and doesn't mean, and otherwise stay out of the way.

There is no account to make and nothing to download. You open the page, tick the boxes that apply to you, and the site does the small bit of maths at the end. That's the whole product, and we think that's exactly as it should be.

Why We Bothered Building Another Version

If you've searched for this test before, you already know what most copies of it look like. Some are buried under pop-ups. Some are frozen in the design language of 2009. A few ask for an email address before they'll show you a number that a pocket calculator could work out — and that last one genuinely bothered us. A test famous for being anonymous shouldn't end with a sign-up form.

So this version was built to be the one we kept wishing existed: fast on a phone, readable without zooming, free of clutter, and private by design rather than by promise. When we changed anything, it was the presentation and the explaining around the test — never the test itself. The 100 questions at the heart of it stay the 100 questions.

How the Test and the Scoring Work

The mechanics could hardly be simpler. You start at 100. Every box you tick takes one point away, because every ticked box is one experience from the list that you've had. Tick nothing and you score 100. Tick everything — which almost nobody does — and you'd score 0.

What the number means is where people understandably want more than a number, so that's where most of our writing goes. Our score meaning guide walks through each range in plain language, and we've written separately about the typical scores people report at different ages and the question everyone ends up asking — whether a score counts as a good one. The short answer there, so you don't have to click anywhere: it doesn't work like that, and it never has.

The Five Editions

The original list is the Standard edition, and it's the one most people mean when they talk about this test. Alongside it we keep four themed editions of 100 questions each, built for different moods and different company: a College edition centred on campus life, a Clean & Safe edition that keeps things light, a Couples edition written for partners comparing notes, and a Wild & Adventure edition for the travel-and-dares crowd. Your score is only ever comparable within the same edition — a 70 on one list is not the same 70 on another.

Your Answers Stay Yours

This part matters to us, so we'll say it plainly. Your answers are never sent to us. The test runs entirely in your browser; the counting happens on your own device, and there's no server on our end collecting results, because we never built one. If the page remembers your half-finished test when you come back to it, that's your browser storing it locally on your device — handy if you get interrupted, and easy to wipe with the Clear button whenever you like. The full detail lives in our Privacy Policy, written in normal language rather than legal fog.

How We Look After the Content

A site like this mostly needs quiet, regular care. We check that the test still calculates correctly, that the pages load properly on phones, and that the guides say what the test actually does — no inflated statistics, no made-up studies, no pretending a dorm icebreaker is a psychological instrument. When readers write in about a confusingly worded question or a guide that could be clearer, that's usually what shapes the next small round of edits. If you spot something that looks wrong, the Contact page is the quickest way to tell us.

One boundary worth stating here as well: we are not Rice University, and this site has no official connection to it. The test started there a long time ago — the history of the test is a good story, and we've told it as carefully as we can — but the university doesn't run, review, or endorse what happens on this page.

Before You Go and Take It

Whatever number you land on, treat it the way students have treated it for generations: as a conversation starter and a small snapshot of a life so far, not a grade and definitely not a verdict. Scores drift downwards as life happens. That's not decline; that's just living.

If you're ready, take the Rice Purity Test — it takes a few minutes. And if you'd rather read first, the blog and guides are where everything else lives.