History of the Rice Purity Test — The Story Behind Rice University’s Most Famous Quiz
Most people who take this quiz today have no idea how old it actually is.
They assume it started on the internet. Maybe the early 2000s. Maybe Reddit or TikTok. The truth is considerably more interesting. The Rice Purity Test connects directly to a student newspaper survey published at a Texas university a full century ago — and the story of how it got from there to here is worth knowing properly.
Rice University — Where It All Began
To understand the quiz, you first need to understand the place it came from.
Rice University is a private research university located in Houston, Texas. It was founded through the estate of William Marsh Rice — a Houston merchant and businessman who accumulated his fortune through land, real estate, and commerce in Texas during the nineteenth century. Rice was murdered in New York in 1900, and after a lengthy legal battle over his estate, the funds were released to establish the institution he had planned.
The William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art opened its doors on September 23, 1912 — exactly twelve years after Rice’s death. Its first class had 59 enrolled students, known informally as the “59 immortals.” The university was coeducational from the beginning, though campus housing remained single-sex for decades.
By the standards of early twentieth-century American universities, Rice was a rigorous place. Admission was selective. Academic expectations were high. And like most universities of the era, social life on campus was shaped by formal codes of conduct and carefully maintained traditions.
It was within this environment that the quiz’s earliest ancestor was born.
The Rice Thresher — The Paper That Started It
Before talking about the quiz itself, the newspaper that created it deserves proper context.
The Rice Thresher is the official student newspaper of Rice University. It was first published on January 15, 1916 — four years after the university opened. The name was suggested by a student named C. Harcourt Wooten, who described a thresher as something that “separates the good from the bad, just as a publication should do.” The founding editor-in-chief was William M. Standish, and the first issue ran four pages with a circulation of around 500 copies.
The Thresher has published consistently since that first issue in 1916, with only two interruptions — once during World War I and once during the spring of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over its history it has won numerous journalism awards including recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists, the College Media Association, and the Associated Collegiate Press.
The paper is organized into several sections covering news, opinion, features, arts and entertainment, and sports. One section in particular matters enormously to the history of the quiz — the satirical Backpage, where the Thresher’s editors have traditionally published humor, parody, and campus commentary. That is where the purity test first appeared.
1924 — The Survey That Started Everything
In 1924, eight years after The Rice Thresher began publishing, the paper did something that would echo across a century.
The editorial staff conducted an informal survey of 119 female undergraduate students at Rice University. The survey had ten questions. By any modern standard the questions were mild — asking about things like whether a student had ever been drunk, whether she had ever danced conspicuously, and whether she had ever done anything she would not tell her mother.
After collecting the responses, the Thresher published the results under a headline that captured the spirit of the exercise perfectly: Rice Girls Not Quite Half Bad.
The first reported average score from that 1924 survey was 62. That number is striking not just as a historical fact but because it is almost identical to the global average that platforms report today — nearly a hundred years later.
A few things about the 1924 survey are worth understanding clearly.
The test was given exclusively to women. This was not unusual for the era — campus surveys about conduct and social behavior were typically directed at female students, reflecting the broader social assumption that women’s behavior required monitoring and documentation in ways that men’s did not.
The survey was published on the Thresher’s satirical Backpage. It was not a formal university study. It was not a psychological assessment. It was campus humor — a lighthearted way for the student paper to comment on the social lives of Rice undergraduates while generating conversation and a few laughs.
It was also not called the Rice Purity Test at the time. That name came later. In 1924 it was simply an informal questionnaire published as a piece of student journalism.
Fifty Years of Women Only — 1924 to 1974
For the next fifty years, the purity survey at Rice remained largely a tradition directed at female students.
The Thresher revisited and revised the survey periodically over those decades — usually on its Backpage, in keeping with the satirical tradition of the original. Questions were updated to reflect changing times. The format evolved slightly. But the core concept remained the same — a checklist of social and personal experiences, scored to produce a number.
The social function of the survey during this period was complicated. On one hand it served as a genuine campus bonding activity — something Rice women could take together and discuss openly. On the other, the framing of women’s experiences through the lens of “purity” and the public reporting of average scores carried implicit judgment. The original 1924 headline — Rice Girls Not Quite Half Bad — captures this tension clearly. It was humor, but it was also commentary on the conduct of female students in ways that no equivalent survey of male students existed to balance.
That changed in 1974.
1974 — Male Students Enter the Picture
Fifty years after the original survey, the Rice Thresher revisited the purity test and included male students for the first time.
This was a significant shift. The questions from the original survey remained largely intact — still written in language that assumed a binary framework for all romantic and social experiences. But the act of including male students changed the social function of the test entirely.
It stopped being an observation about women’s conduct and became something closer to a shared campus ritual — an activity all incoming students could participate in together as a bonding exercise. The inclusion of men transformed the quiz from a survey directed at one group to a mutual reflection that both groups engaged with on equal terms.
By the late 1970s the purity test had become genuinely embedded in Rice University’s O-Week culture. Orientation Week — the period before classes began when new students were welcomed to campus and introduced to university life — became the natural home for the test. Students filled it out together, compared scores, and used the results as a conversation starter during the early days of what would become lasting friendships and communities.
1988 — The First Major Expansion
The next significant milestone came in 1988, when the Rice Thresher published a dramatically expanded version of the test.
The 1988 edition grew to 150 questions — a substantial increase from the original ten. This expansion reflected genuine evolution in what students considered relevant and worth documenting. New categories were added. Questions about substance use became more detailed. Physical and romantic experiences were covered more extensively.
The 1988 version also included questions about same-sex relationships — an acknowledgment that the student body included people whose experiences did not fit the binary framework of the original questions. However, the approach was imperfect. Same-sex questions were treated as a separate set rather than being integrated with the rest, which effectively isolated rather than included queer students. Someone who had experiences outside heterosexual relationships received a lower score for that reason alone — a design flaw that the Thresher’s editorial staff would later recognize and address.
The 1988 version was also the first to create a test that required real time and honest reflection to complete. At 150 questions, this was no longer something you could dash through in five minutes at a party. It became a more deliberate activity — something you sat down to complete.
It was also during this era that the test’s language began reflecting changes in Rice University’s broader community. Following the university’s admission of students of color in 1963 — after a legal challenge to the original charter that had restricted admission to white students — the test gradually evolved to reflect a more diverse student body and broader range of social experiences.
1998 — The Gender-Neutral Revision
Ten years after the major expansion, the 1998 revision addressed the most significant structural flaw in the test’s history.
The gendered language that had been present in the quiz since its 1924 origins — language that framed all questions in terms of male-female relationships and excluded other orientations — was revised. Gendered pronouns were replaced with the abbreviation MPS, standing for Member of Preferred Sex.
This change made the test inclusive for all sexual orientations without requiring separate question sets for different groups. A question about spending the night with a member of the preferred sex now applied equally to someone of any orientation — removing the structural penalty that the 1988 version had imposed on queer students.
The 1998 revision also removed several questions that had appeared in the 1988 edition — including references to non-consensual situations that the Thresher’s editorial team had come to regret including. The cleaned-up, gender-neutral 1998 format became the foundation for most of the online versions that would follow.
The Internet Era — Late 1990s and Early 2000s
While Rice University students were taking the purity test as a campus tradition, purity tests more broadly were already spreading through the early internet.
Online quizzes of various kinds had been circulating on Usenet bulletin boards since the early 1980s — making them among the earliest internet memes, long before that term existed. By the mid to late 1990s, as internet access spread through American university campuses, the Rice Purity Test specifically began appearing on personal websites and university servers beyond Houston.
It spread through email forwards, early online forums, and word of mouth between students at different universities. By the early 2000s it had traveled far beyond Rice University — being taken at orientation weeks across the United States by students who had no connection to Houston and no knowledge of the quiz’s origins in The Rice Thresher.
The test had completed a fundamental transition. What had started as a single-campus newspaper tradition had become a broadly shared piece of American university culture.
2011 and 2012 — The Editorial Controversy and the Online Standard
In 2011, the Rice Thresher’s editorial board made a decision that would shape how millions of people around the world experience the quiz today.
The editors refused to publish the annual purity test. Their objection was to specific content in the existing version — questions that referenced non-consensual situations and content they considered inappropriate. It was an editorial decision that reflected growing awareness of how certain questions could cause harm rather than simply prompt reflection.
The following year, in 2012, an edited version was published. Problematic questions were removed. Language was further updated for inclusivity and clarity. This 2012 version was simultaneously published online — and it is the version that has remained at the standard quiz website essentially unchanged since that year.
According to data reported by the Rice Thresher in 2017, the online version received over 1.5 million visits in that year alone — more than a decade before the quiz achieved its biggest viral moment on social media. That traffic came almost entirely from word of mouth and university culture, with no significant social media amplification.
2020 — TikTok and the Biggest Viral Moment
In April 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, something shifted in the quiz’s search traffic.
With universities closed, students at home, and social life disrupted globally, people turned to online activities in unprecedented numbers. The Rice Purity Test became one of them. Google Trends data shows a sharp spike in search interest beginning in April 2020. Early TikTok trends around the quiz included videos of people making family members take the test — a format that generated millions of views on individual posts.
By October 2020, the hashtag RicePurityTest had accumulated billions of views on TikTok globally. The quiz was being taken and discussed across dozens of countries, among people who had no university connection and no prior knowledge of Rice University or The Rice Thresher.
The viral moment also inspired derivatives. In late December 2020, two college students created an updated version called the Innocence Test — designed to capture experiences more relevant to the digital era that the 1980s-era Rice Purity Test questions did not cover. That quiz generated 1.4 million responses in its first 24 hours on BuzzFeed before the creators launched a dedicated website.
2022 — Mainstream Cultural Recognition
The quiz reached another milestone in October 2022 when Netflix’s animated series Big Mouth dedicated an episode to it.
Season 6, Episode 4 — titled Rice Purity Test — brought the quiz into mainstream entertainment in a way that introduced it to audiences who had never encountered it through university culture or social media. The episode reflected how deeply the quiz had embedded itself in popular consciousness among younger generations.
Rice University’s Relationship With the Quiz Today
One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of the quiz’s history is the relationship between the online version and Rice University itself.
Rice University does not endorse or maintain any version of the Rice Purity Test available online. The university acknowledges its historical connection to the campus tradition — the quiz genuinely did originate at Rice and genuinely was spread through The Rice Thresher — but the institution has no formal involvement with any website hosting the quiz.
The Rice Thresher continues to publish its own updated version of the test periodically for Rice students as part of O-Week tradition. But the version that most people around the world encounter online is the 2012 edition — essentially frozen at the point where the Thresher’s editorial board last revised it.
This separation between the campus tradition and the global internet phenomenon is significant. The quiz carries Rice University’s name because it genuinely started there. But what it has become — a quiz taken by millions of people across dozens of countries, many of whom have no connection to Houston or to American university culture at all — is something far beyond what the student newspaper staff of 1924 could have imagined or intended.
A Century of the Same Question
What makes the quiz’s history genuinely remarkable is not just its longevity — it is the consistency of its purpose across a hundred years.
The 119 female students who answered ten questions for The Rice Thresher in 1924 were doing something fundamentally similar to what a teenager in South Korea or Brazil does today when they open the quiz on their phone. They were taking stock of their experiences. They were comparing notes with people around them. They were using a simple structured format to have conversations about personal history that might otherwise feel awkward or difficult to start.
The quiz has changed in format, in length, in language, in reach. But the reason people take it has remained essentially unchanged since that first satirical survey appeared on the Backpage of a four-page student newspaper in Houston, Texas, over a hundred years ago.
The Honest Summary
The Rice Purity Test began as a ten-question newspaper survey published on a satirical back page in 1924. It passed through generations of Rice University students, was revised multiple times by The Rice Thresher, moved online in the late 1990s, and became a global phenomenon through TikTok in 2020.
That journey — from a conservative Texas university campus to a quiz taken by millions of people across dozens of countries — is one of the more unlikely stories in the history of internet culture. And it all started with 119 Rice University women, ten questions, and a headline about being not quite half bad.
FAQs
When was the Rice Purity Test created?
The earliest version appeared in 1924 when The Rice Thresher — Rice University’s student newspaper — published a ten-question survey of 119 female students. The 100-question format familiar today developed through revisions in 1988, 1998, and 2012.
Who created the Rice Purity Test?
The editorial staff of The Rice Thresher, Rice University’s student newspaper, created the original survey in 1924. The quiz evolved through subsequent generations of Rice University students over the following decades. No single individual is credited with creating it.
What is The Rice Thresher?
The Rice Thresher is the official student newspaper of Rice University in Houston, Texas. It has been published since January 15, 1916, making it one of the longest-running university student newspapers in the American South. The satirical Backpage of the paper was where the purity test originally appeared.
Did Rice University officially create the Rice Purity Test?
The quiz originated among Rice University students and was published through the student newspaper. Rice University itself does not claim ownership of the quiz and does not endorse or maintain any online version of it today.
Why was the quiz originally only for women?
The 1924 survey reflected the social norms of that era, when campus conduct surveys were typically directed at female students. Male students were first included in the 1974 revision of the test.
What changed in the 1998 revision?
The 1998 revision replaced gendered language with the gender-neutral term MPS — Member of Preferred Sex — making the quiz inclusive for all sexual orientations. It also removed several inappropriate questions that had appeared in the 1988 edition.
When did the quiz go online?
The quiz began spreading through university networks and early internet forums in the late 1990s. The current standard online version was published in 2012 following an editorial revision by The Rice Thresher.
Why did the quiz go viral on TikTok in 2020?
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, with universities closed and social life disrupted, online quiz activity surged. The Rice Purity Test became a major trend, with the hashtag accumulating billions of views globally by October 2020 on TikTok.
What is O-Week at Rice University?
O-Week is Rice University’s Orientation Week — the period before classes begin when incoming freshmen are welcomed to campus. The purity test became a traditional O-Week bonding activity for new students, a role it still serves on campus today.
How has the quiz changed since 1924?
The quiz grew from 10 questions in 1924 to 150 in the 1988 The Rice Thresher edition, before settling at 100 questions in the version most widely used online today. Language has been updated for inclusivity, inappropriate content has been removed, and the quiz has shifted from a women-only survey to one taken by people of all genders and orientations worldwide.
