The average Rice Purity score: what it is, and what moves it
A Rice Purity Test average is the sum of every submitted score divided by the number of submissions, on a scale from 0 to 100 where each of the 100 statements you check removes one point. This site publishes its own average once 30 results are in, and holds fewer than that today — below that threshold a single submission visibly moves the number, so there is nothing here worth quoting yet. What the figure will never be is a population statistic: it describes the people who chose to take a quiz on the internet and submit the result.
Why the average moves with whoever takes the test
Nobody is sampled. The results on this page come from people who went looking for a purity test and finished one, which is a group that reshapes itself constantly — a post on one app sends a wave of sixteen-year-olds, a thread on another sends people in their thirties, and the average follows them.
The question set makes that effect large. Of the 100 statements on the classic test, most describe things that simply take years to encounter: a first kiss, a first drink, being arrested, a specific substance. A reader of fifteen and a reader of thirty can be equally honest and land twenty points apart, because one has had fifteen more years for items to become true. Age moves this number more than anything else about the person answering.
So the figure at the top is a live reading of who is on the site, not a fact about people in general. The honest way to use it: watch how far your own score sits from it and ask which blocks of the list explain the distance.
The median, and why it is not the average
The average adds every score together and divides by the count, so one result of 3 pulls harder on it than one result of 63. The median sorts every score and takes the one in the middle — it counts how many results are below you, not how far below.
Both figures are published on the statistics page the moment results exist. Until then there is nothing to compare.
If you want to know where you stand rather than how you compare to a mean, the percentile is the better number: it is the share of submitted results below yours. How to read your percentile works through what it does and does not tell you.
The average on each of the seven tests
Each questionnaire asks its own questions and scores them at its own weight, so these averages sit beside each other rather than against each other. A 70 on a 50-question test worth two points an answer is not a 70 on the classic list.
| Test | Points per answer | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Rice Purity Test100 questions | 1 | 100 |
| Teen Purity Test50 questions | 2 | 50 |
| Couples Purity Test50 questions | 2 | 50 |
| Innocence Test100 questions | 1 | 100 |
| College Purity Test50 questions | 2 | 50 |
| LGBTQ Purity Test50 questions | 2 | 50 |
| AO3 Purity Test100 questions | 1 | 100 |
No test has reached the 30 results a published figure needs, so the table shows what each instrument is rather than what it has measured. Full per-test figures, including the last 24 hours, are on the statistics page. Two situations where the same average gets read very differently: on campus and with a partner.
What your own distance from it means
Very little on its own, and that is the useful part. The score is a count of checked statements subtracted from 100, so a gap between your number and the average is a count of statements: on the classic test, where each answer is worth one point, a gap of eleven points is eleven statements one of you checked and the other did not.
What the gap does tell you, if you go looking:
- Which block moved it. The classic list runs roughly mildest to most extreme, so a score in the sixties usually means the romance and early sexual questions are checked and the substance and legal ones mostly are not.
- How much of it is time. Items about marriage, being fired, or being arrested cannot be true for someone who has not had the years yet.
- Nothing about who you are. The list is a list of situations. It has no view on whether any of them was a good idea.
Every score from 0 to 100 has a page explaining which part of the list it usually covers. The full question list is published if you would rather read the items than the statistics.
Questions about the average
What is the average Rice Purity Test score?
This site has not yet recorded the 30 results it publishes an average over, so there is no figure here. An average taken over a handful of rows moves with every new submission, and quoting one would be inventing a statistic.
Is the average the same as a normal score?
No. The average is the arithmetic mean of whoever chose to take the test. Nobody is sampled at random, so there is no normal score the average is measuring against.
Why does the average differ from the median?
The mean adds every score and divides by the count, so a handful of very low scores pull it down. The median is the score in the middle of the sorted list and ignores how far the extremes reach.
Can averages from different purity tests be compared?
No. The seven questionnaires on this site ask different questions and weight them differently, so a score only means something against other scores from the same test.