Is there an official Rice Purity Test?

No. Nobody owns the list, nobody certifies a version of it, and Rice University does not publish one. Every copy online — including the one on this site — is a republication of a questionnaire with no author and no custodian, which is exactly why the wording drifts between sites and why three words keep getting searched as if they named different tests: official, original, and updated.

What “official” would have to mean

For a test to be official, someone would have to answer for it: publish the canonical wording, decide when an item changes, and say which copies are wrong. No such party exists here. Rice University has never presented the questionnaire as institutional, and no company holds it either — the list is unattributed, unregistered and freely copied.

The closest thing to an authority is the university’s student newspaper, and what it printed is not what circulates today. The Thresher of 7 March 1924 reported an informal ten-question survey of 119 female undergraduates. Its April Fools’ edition of 1 April 1988, published under the joke masthead The Rice Trasher, carried a test built from 150 questions. Both issues are held in Rice University’s digital collections. Ten questions, then a hundred and fifty, then the hundred people take now — first attested, as far as any dated record goes, in a 1993 index of 33 circulating versions that lists a Rice University version at 100 questions and nothing about its contents. Details and the sourcing behind them are in the history of the test.

So what do people mean by each word?

The word searched	What it usually means	What to do about it
Official	“The real one, not a knock-off.” There is no real one to find.	Judge a copy by whether it shows its sources, not by the badge it wears.
Original	Either the archive documents (1924, 1988) or simply “the 100-item list before sites started editing it”.	For the second sense, the reconciled list is on the canonical question list.
Updated · new · modern	A copy with reworded or added items — most often the three about explicit messages, photographs and video chat.	Fine to take, but the score only compares with people who took the same wording.
Weighted	A variant that scores some items higher than others. Not the Rice format.	Expect a different scale; the classic list gives every item one point.

How to date the copy in front of you

You do not need the history to tell an old copy from a recent one — the questions give it away. The list here has exactly three items that require a phone: explicit messages, explicit photographs and video chat, at questions 32 to 34. A copy carrying none of them was written for a web that had no camera phones on it, and a copy carrying five or six has been edited by whoever published it.

Two more tells. Numbering drifts once anything is inserted: the arrest question sits at 63 on the reconciled list, so a copy that numbers it differently has added or dropped items above it. Wording drift is the other, though it is smaller than people expect: of the six items the four sources split on, five differ only in punctuation or a repeated gloss, and one — the item at 69 — is the single place a copy censors rather than rephrases. A copy that softens more than that has been rewritten by its publisher.

Why an unofficial test can still be worth taking

A test with no owner cannot be authoritative, but it can be consistent, and consistency is what a comparable number needs. What matters is whether the site tells you which 100 statements it used, whether it changes them later, and whether its figures come from the people who actually took that list. Those are checkable claims; “official version” is not.

On this site the list is fixed and published in full, the reconciliation is documented, and every published figure comes from submissions to these questions. When a test has no authority behind it, showing the working is the only thing left that means anything.