What Is The Rice Purity Test And What Do The Scores Mean? The Quiz That Inspired Trends Like The Innocence Test Explained

Taking some version of a purity test is a rite of passage for high schoolers and college students around the globe, but no one quiz is perhaps more influential than the Rice Purity Test. But where does this name come from and what do such tests entail?

What Is The Rice Purity Test?

Purity tests are a common high school and college phenomenon and serve as a way for kids to engage with each other over shared experiences. Such tests often probe into the extent of a person's past romantic experiences, run-ins with the law, and experiences with intimacy. The distribution of such tests has been a documented process in the U.S. at schools like MIT, Columbia and Indiana University, but it wasn't until Texas's Rice University created a globally accessible website for their version of the test that it become the hugely popular phenomenon it is today.

The original Rice Purity Test was only distributed to women, and was created back in 1924, which would explain some since-removed questions like, "Have you ever been engaged and broken it?" The current version of the test has made some extensive edits in the 100 years since it was first devised, and is hosted on TheRicePurityTest.com.

What Do The Rice Purity Test Scores Mean?

The Rice Purity Test deducts points for every "degenerate" activity you have experienced in the list, and the lower your score is, the more "experienced" you are and the lower your supposed "purity" is implied to be. College and High School students who exchange Rice Purity scores generally tend to do so in order to gauge the level of "experience" their peers have.

But if you have taken the test, you may have noticed that the list of activities gets progressively stranger and more illegal. It might surprise you to know then that the score weighs the initial tame questions like, "holding hands" and later questions like "been arrested" or "convicted of a felony" equally. This is to say that you never really get a true gauge of a person's experiences by just knowing their score.

When Did The Rice Purity Test Become Popular?

According to the Rice Thresher, the undergraduate publication responsible for hosting the quiz site, interest in the Rice Purity Test grew around the year 2017 after it was shared primarily by word of mouth in high schools around the U.S. In April 2020, this interest spread globally, aided in part by a TikTok trend where people made their parents take the test.

The test is also a popular topic of discussion with streamers and internet personalities, with members of NIJISANJI EN, a VTuber streaming group, taking the test sometime in 2020. Another popular personality who has shared the results of his Rice Purity Test is Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

The Rice Purity Test even received a whole episode of the Netflix television show Big Mouth dedicated to it, as well as a song sequence.

For the full history of the Rice Purity Test, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.