Innocence Test

No, and they have nothing in common but the word. A polygraph records breathing, pulse and skin conductance while somebody is questioned, and whether those signals reveal deception at all is contested wherever it is used as evidence. This is a checklist you fill in yourself: it records which statements you say applied to you, verifies nothing, and could not — there is no signal here to measure.

Accuracy is the wrong measure, because there is nothing for the score to be accurate about. The number is a count of the statements you ticked, and that arithmetic is exact. What it cannot be is valid: the list has never been normed against a population, tested for reliability, or compared with any outside record, so it makes no claim about you that could turn out to be right or wrong. It says how many, on one particular list, on the day you took it.

A checklist of things people do, scored by subtraction: you start at 100, tick every statement that applies, and each tick costs 1 point. The number left is a count of the 100 experiences on this list you have not had. It asks about travel, work, money, driving, risk and loss rather than sex and substances, which is what separates it from the purity tests it borrows its arithmetic from.

Subject matter, not length — both lists run 100 statements on the same 0-100 scale. The Rice version spends most of its questions on sex, alcohol and campus rule-breaking; here exactly one statement mentions alcohol and none ask about sex. The space goes to travel, driving, work, money, injury, performing and loss instead, so two people whose Rice scores are identical can finish far apart on this one.

You begin at 100 and each statement you check subtracts 1 point. Nothing is weighted, so an item most people check costs exactly as much as one almost nobody does. Check every statement and you finish at 0.

The scale has no good end. A high number means fewer of these particular experiences have happened to you, which is mostly a function of age, opportunity and what you have chosen to spend time on. People read the top of the scale as virtue and the bottom as failure, and neither reading survives looking at what the questions actually ask.

About 8 minutes for most people — 100 checkboxes and no free text. There is no timer and no submit gate, so you can leave items unchecked if you are unsure; an unchecked box simply costs you nothing. Your score appears the moment you finish, without an email or an account.

Yes, and this is the one use of the test that holds up. Because the questions ask whether something has ever happened, your score can only fall over time, which makes the drop between two dates a rough record of a stretch of life. Every result you get is kept on your history page, stored in your own browser.