Every version, from 70 questions to 1,500
The Rice Purity Test is one branch of a family, and the family is documented. On 19 October 1993 a message forwarded around MIT catalogued 33 purity tests circulating between campuses — among them, on its own line, a Rice University version at 100 questions. Everything below comes from that index and from two of the documents it points to, both still online.
The 1993 index, and what it does and does not prove
The file is a forwarded email dated 19 October 1993, sitting on MIT’s servers. It is a list of filenames with one-line labels, offered by a student at Amherst who would mail you any of them — over BITNET, if you preferred. Line eleven reads purity-100-rice — Rice University Version.
That is a dated record of a hundred-question Rice version in circulation by October 1993, catalogued by someone with no stake in the story, which is more than the commonly repeated origin dates have behind them. What it is not is the test itself: the file 404s today and the Internet Archive holds no snapshot of it, so nothing here claims to know which hundred questions it contained. Why there is no official version covers the rest of that problem.
The 500-question edition, and why every score is out of 100
The best-preserved relative is the Unisex Omnisexual Purity Test, version 4.0, marked Final Release, 23-Apr-1988 and credited to students at Yale’s Silliman College and Dartmouth’s Alpha Theta. Its scoring instruction is one sentence: “Count ‘yes’ answers. Subtract that number from 500. Divide the result by 5.”
That division is the whole reason a purity score is always a number out of 100. The format never counted to a hundred because a hundred questions was the standard — it normalised whatever length it had into a percentage, and the hundred-item versions are simply the ones where the arithmetic disappears. Our list does the same thing with the division left out: one item, one point.
The date is worth sitting with. Three weeks before it, on 1 April 1988, Rice’s student paper printed its own 150-question test in an April Fools’ issue — both documents are in the same fortnight of the same spring, on two campuses that were not talking to each other about it.
The long ones
The index tops out at a 1,500-question edition, version 6.6b, dated 17 August 1992 and organised into 18 sections. Its instructions invert the arithmetic — count the no answers, divide by 15 — and it insists on two things the modern versions dropped: “all technicalities count”, and there is no passing or failing score. Reading it is a reminder that the genre was written to be funny before it was written to be shared.
What the archive holds
Twelve of the thirty-three entries, with what the index or the document itself says about each. Dates appear only where the file carries one.
| Version | Items | What is recorded about it |
|---|---|---|
| Rice University version | 100 | Listed in the 1993 index as purity-100-rice |
| First CMU version (v2) | 247 | Carnegie Mellon |
| Official 400 (v3.5) | 400 | Second CMU release |
| Third CMU release | 425 | Carnegie Mellon |
| Unisex Omnisexual Purity Test (v4.0) | 500 | Yale (Silliman College) and Dartmouth (Alpha Theta), 23 April 1988 |
| Rochester version (v5.02) | 350 | University of Rochester |
| SUNY Potsdam / Clarkson version | 600 | Listed without a date |
| Condensation of the 500 | 200 | Obtained via Johns Hopkins |
| Unisex Purity Test (v6.6b) | 1500 | 18 sections, 17 August 1992 |
| Dabney House test | 100 | Caltech |
| Baker House variant | 100 | MIT, one half of the questions |
| Penthouse column version | 100 | Printed September 1989 |
What survived, and what to take
The hundred-item version outlasted every longer one for an obvious reason: it can be finished. A 1,500-question test is an evening’s work and a 500-question test is an hour; a hundred yes-or-no lines take about six minutes, which is the length that survives being passed around a room.
None of the scores travel between versions. If you want a number that compares with other people’s, it has to come from the same questions — which is why this site publishes its list in full and does not edit it. There are 7 lists here, each scored in its own pool: compared side by side, with the reconciliation of the classic one written down item by item.
Questions people actually ask
How many versions of the purity test are there?
A catalogue forwarded on MIT's servers in October 1993 lists 33 files, running from 70 questions to 1500, including a Rice University version at 100. That is a snapshot of one collection, not a census: house and campus variants were written faster than anyone indexed them.
Which purity test is the long one with 500 questions?
The Unisex Omnisexual Purity Test, version 4.0, final release 23 April 1988, credited to students at Yale's Silliman College and Dartmouth's Alpha Theta. Its instructions are to count the yes answers, subtract from 500 and divide by five — which is how a 500-item test still reports a score out of 100.
Are scores from different versions comparable?
No, even though they all end in a number out of 100. A percentage from a 1500-question test and a percentage from a 100-question one are answers to different questionnaires; the same person scores differently on each because the items differ, not because they changed.
Which version does this site use?
The 100-item Rice list, reconciled from four live copies with the disagreements published. This site does not host the 400, 500 or 1500-question editions — they are archived student humour from the 1980s and 1990s, they are linked here as sources, and a fair amount of their content has not aged well.