The History of the Rice Purity Test — 1924 Dorm Survey to Today

Every tradition was new once. This one began as a handwritten list in a student residence in Houston, Texas, and somehow — through photocopiers, dorm corridors, a campus newspaper and eventually the early web — it outlived everyone who wrote it. This is the story of how that happened, told as honestly as a hundred-year-old piece of campus folklore allows.

Start with the thing itself, in case you've landed here first. The Rice Purity Test is a list of 100 experiences — some sweet, some reckless, plenty of them ordinary — and you tick off the ones you've had. Your score is whatever is left of 100. That is all it has ever been. And yet students are still taking it a century after it was written, which raises a fair question: where did this list actually come from? If you want to skip the story and just take it, the modern version is waiting on our homepage — take the Rice Purity Test — and we will still be here when you come back with questions.

1924: A Survey in a Houston Dorm

The story, as it has been handed down, begins in 1924 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Rice was barely a teenager of a university itself — it had opened its doors in 1912 — and its early classes were small enough that a handwritten questionnaire could plausibly reach most of the students it was meant for.

By the most commonly told account, the first version of the test was drawn up by students for the newest arrivals: the freshmen. It was a survey of experiences — the things you had done, seen, tried or dared before arriving at university — and it was never meant as an exam. Nobody graded it. Nobody filed the results. It was closer to a parlour game with a score attached, a way of turning the awkward first weeks of term, when nobody knows anybody, into an evening of comparisons, confessions and laughter.

Details from that first decade are thin, and we'll be honest about that throughout this article, because a list passed hand to hand for a hundred years picks up decoration along the way. What is consistent across every retelling is the shape of it: Rice, the 1920s, freshmen, and a checklist that measured "purity" with its tongue firmly in its cheek.

Orientation Week and the Real Point of the Test

To understand why the test survived its first year — most dorm games don't — you have to understand when it was taken. Rice, like many American universities, runs an orientation period for new students (today it's known as O-Week), and the test became part of that ritual season: the strange, intense fortnight when several hundred strangers are all trying to become friends at once.

That setting explains the test's strange durability better than the questions themselves do. Comparing scores is a shortcut. It lets a group of eighteen-year-olds who met on Monday reveal things about themselves by Friday that ordinary small talk would take a semester to reach — who's sheltered, who's pretending not to be, who has the best stories. The score was never really the point. The conversation after the score was the point, and it still is. Ask anyone who took the test in a group what they remember, and it won't be the number. It'll be the room.

Paper, Photocopies and the Student Newspaper

For its first several decades the test lived on paper, and paper has a particular way of spreading. A list would be typed, copied, carried to another dorm, retyped with a few questions updated for the times, and copied again. Each generation of students quietly edited it — swapping in the references of their own decade and letting the baffling ones die. The test people argue about today is less a single document than a river: roughly the same water, never exactly the same list.

Campus lore gives a good deal of the credit for carrying it beyond one residence hall to The Rice Thresher, Rice's student newspaper, which is said to have printed versions of the test over the years. A newspaper printing does something a photocopy can't: it makes the list semi-official, something the whole campus does rather than something one corridor passes around. Whether every printing in the legend really happened is hard to verify now, but the mechanism is believable, because it's how the test kept behaving for the rest of the century — every new medium that could carry a list, carried this one.

How the List Grew to 100 Questions

Early versions were shorter and looser than the one you know. Across the middle of the century, as the list passed through more hands than anyone counted, it grew — new questions added as student life invented new experiences worth asking about, old ones sharpened, duplicated or dropped. By the 1980s, retellings generally agree, the test had settled into the form we still recognise: 100 questions, running from the innocent end of student life to the far end, each worth exactly one point.

The round number matters more than it looks. A score out of 100 reads like a percentage, and a percentage feels like a grade, which is exactly the joke the test has always played on the people taking it: it borrows the costume of an exam to measure something no exam could. It's also why the score is so shareable. "I got a 63" needs no explanation, in any decade, in any medium. If you're wondering what the ranges people land in actually suggest, our score meaning guide breaks the whole scale down.

MPS and Other Fossils Buried in the Questions

Read the classic list closely and you can see its age in places, like rings in a tree. The clearest fossil is three letters: MPS. Throughout the older questions you'll meet phrases about "the MPS" — and generations of freshmen have had to have it explained. MPS stands for "Member of the Preferred Sex": the person, or kind of person, you're attracted to. It's a coy, formal, faintly ridiculous phrase, and that's precisely why it's still there. The list is a historical document wearing a quiz's clothes, and its old-fashioned wording is part of the charm people would riot over if you modernised it away.

Other questions date themselves just as honestly — references shaped by decades when calling someone, writing letters, or sneaking out carried different weight than they do in the age of the group chat. Students have always edited around the edges, but the bones of the list, MPS included, have proved surprisingly load-bearing.

The Internet Picks It Up

The test's last big migration was the shortest. When the web arrived on campuses in the 1990s, the purity test was among the natural first things students put on it: it was already a list, already scored, already meant to be shared. Early versions lived on plain personal pages and university servers, the score counted by hand or by the simplest of scripts, and the link passed around by email and word of mouth exactly the way the paper copies had been.

From there it did what it had always done, at new speed. It spread to schools that had never heard of Rice, then to countries where Rice means the grain first and the university second. Social media gave it fresh fuel in the 2010s and again in the 2020s, when posting your score became the digital version of the dorm-room reveal. Through every hop, the essential ritual stayed untouched: tick the boxes, get the number, compare the number, argue about the number. If the practical side is what you're after — how scoring works, what counts as average at your age — our frequently asked questions cover the mechanics without the mythology.

Why It Survives

A century is a long time for a joke to stay funny, so the test must be doing something more than joking. We'd put it this way: it gives people a structured way to tell the truth about themselves at exactly the age when they're busiest inventing themselves. The list asks, so nobody has to. The score is silly, so admitting things to it feels safe. And because everyone in the room answers the same hundred questions, nobody is singled out — the sheltered and the wild are measured with the same ruler, and both ends of the scale get laughed with, not at.

It also hands each new class of students a small piece of continuity. Taking the same test your predecessors took — at Rice and far beyond it — is a way of joining a line of people who were once exactly as new as you are. Traditions don't have to be solemn to be real. Some of them are a photocopied list and a number out of a hundred.

A Note on What's Lore and What's Fact

Honesty requires a paragraph like this one. The broad outline above — Rice University, 1924, a freshmen's survey that spread on paper and settled into 100 questions by the 1980s — is the account the test's own history is consistently told with, and we have no better one. But many of the colourful particulars attached to it over the decades can't be documented the way a modern event can, because the people involved were students amusing themselves, not archivists. Where a detail rests on campus lore rather than record, we've tried to say so in the telling rather than dress it up as certainty. That seems right for a test that was always honest about being a game.

Sources & further reading: for the university where it all began, see Rice University and its official history pages; for the scoring side of the story, our own guides linked throughout this article are the natural next stop.