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Purity Test Kit

About Rice Purity Test Kit

Rice Purity Test Kit is an independent implementation of the Rice Purity Test — the hundred-item checklist associated with Rice University, which grew out of a campus questionnaire tradition older than the web and was passed around on paper for decades before anyone typed it into a form. The dates quoted for its origin are unsourced, and the history article says which parts of that story hold up. This site is run by one developer and built so the questionnaire loads fast, works with a keyboard and scores without a page reload, rather than behaving like the CGI forms it is copied from.

What is different here

Dozens of sites host the same hundred questions. Four things separate this one:

  • Statistics from real submissions. When you finish, the site records the test key, your score, the time and — only if you picked one — an age band. The statistics page and the percentile line on your result read from that live table, not from a number typed into the HTML by hand. If the database is unreachable, the site shows the result without statistics instead of inventing them.
  • A page for every score. All 101 outcomes from 0 to 100 have their own page explaining what that specific number describes, which questions typically account for it and how it compares with the rest of the distribution. Start at the score index.
  • 7 question sets, not one. The classic test is written for adults. A teen version, a couples version, a college version, an LGBTQ version, an AO3 fandom version, and a 100-question innocence test that swaps sex and substances for travel, work and money ask different things — and none of them is the classic list with items removed; each is its own set of statements, keeping its own separate statistics. See the comparison.
  • Nothing stored but the number, unless you say otherwise. Your answers are scored in your browser. There is no account, no login and no profile — two values leave your device, the test key and the score, and the row that gets written holds a third the server sets itself: the time. Two controls above the submit button can add to that, and both start off: a checkbox that also sends the list of statements you checked, so they can be folded into per-question totals, and a six-way age band that is stored in the same row as the score. No IP address, no cookie and no answer sheet is kept either way. The privacy policy describes all of it, plus the cookie-free page-view count.

Why the per-question numbers are opt-in

Knowing how many people checked question 47 needs the answers themselves, not just the totals — and sending answers is a bigger ask than sending a score. Every site could collect them silently, since the browser already knows them. Asking instead costs us most of the sample: only the people who tick the box are counted, and they are not a random slice of everyone. What it buys is that nobody’s answers were taken without them agreeing to it. Each percentage on the question breakdown is counted from those volunteers alone, so read it as what opted-in visitors reported, not as what everyone did.

How the scoring works

You start at 100 and subtract one point for every item you have done. Nothing is weighted: shoplifting and holding hands each cost exactly one point, which is why the total is a count of experiences rather than a measure of anything about you. Unanswered questions count as “no”, so the score you get is the highest one consistent with what you checked.

The result is then placed in one of 9 bands, from Untouched at the top down to Off the Charts at the bottom. Bands exist to give the number a label people can talk about; they carry no judgement, and the boundaries are our editorial choice rather than anything inherited from the original sheet.

Is this site safe to use, and what if it will not load?

Nothing you tick leaves your browser. The checkboxes are counted locally as you go; when you press the button, one number is sent — the score, which test produced it, and the moment it arrived. Which statements you ticked are sent only if you tick the separate box that says so, and even then they arrive as a list of item numbers attached to no identity.

No account, no email, no cookie. There is nothing to sign up for and no login, so there is no profile to leak. The site sets no advertising or analytics cookie at all, which is why you have not been asked to consent to one — the counters here are per-page tallies that cannot tell two visits apart. The privacy policy lists every field stored, and how this site is made explains the mechanism.

You can verify all of it. Open your browser’s network tab before you press the button and you will see three lines to this site, not one: GET /api/session when the page loads, which asks for a single-use token and says nothing about you; POST /api/submit when you press the button, which is the one carrying your score, and whose body you can read in full; and a second GET /api/session straight after, fetching the next token in case you change a box. Before all of them, on every page, one POST /api/ping carries the path you are on and the bare hostname that sent you — the page-view counter described above, which stores no identifier and is skipped entirely if your browser sends Do Not Track. Your browser may also prefetch the pages the result links to. That is the whole list, and it is worth checking rather than taking this paragraph’s word for it, which is why the paragraph names what you should find.

If the test will not load or the boxes will not tick, it is almost never the site. The list is plain HTML and the score is counted in the page, so a blank list means the page or its stylesheet did not finish arriving — a reload usually fixes it. On a school or office network the more likely cause is a filter; the unblocked page names the three different failures and tells you which one you are looking at.

What this site is not

Not affiliated with Rice University. The test carries the name because it spread from that campus, and the university has never run, endorsed or maintained it. Nobody here has any connection to Rice, and no result from this site means anything to them.

Not a psychological instrument. The list was never validated, never tested for reliability, and measures no recognised construct. It has no diagnostic value, predicts nothing about your future, and cannot tell you whether your behaviour is healthy. A therapist or a doctor answers those questions; a party checklist copied between students does not.

Not a scoreboard. A high number is not virtue and a low number is not damage. Age explains most of the variation between two people’s scores, and the rest is circumstance. See the terms for the formal version of this.

For anyone writing about the test

The dated documents, the six points where live copies of the question list disagree, and blanket permission to quote any of it are on the press and citation page — written for student papers, wikis and teachers, who otherwise have to take the internet's word for a history nobody sourced.

Corrections

Question wording drifts between copies of the test, and no copy is the authoritative one to check ours against. If an item here is phrased differently from the copy you know, or a statistic looks wrong, write to [email protected] — the contact page explains what is useful to include.