The test and Rice University
The rice in the name is a university in Houston, Texas, not a grain. That much is settled. What the university actually did is narrower than the name suggests: its student newspaper reported a ten-question survey in 1924 and printed a 150-question test in 1988, and the 100-item list that spread from there has never been a Rice University publication.
Two documents, in the university’s own archive
The Rice Thresher has been the student newspaper since 1916, and two of its issues carry the paper trail everyone else paraphrases.
The first is dated Friday 7 March 1924 — volume 9, number 22 — and reports an informal survey of 119 female undergraduates under the headline “Rice Girls Not Quite Half Bad”. Ten questions, about drinking, dancing, and what the students did or did not tell their mothers. It is the earliest dated item anyone has produced for this test, and it is a newspaper story about a survey, not a hundred-item questionnaire.
The second is dated Friday 1 April 1988 — volume 75, number 24.5 — the paper’s April Fools’ edition, printed under the joke masthead The Rice Trasher. The test in it is built from 150 questions. Both issues sit in Rice University’s digital collections, held by the Woodson Research Center at Fondren Library.
Neither is the list people take today. Ten questions in 1924, a hundred and fifty in a 1988 parody issue, a hundred at some undocumented point after that: the full sourcing is here, including what these scans do and do not prove.
What the university has never done
Publish an authorised version. Score anyone. Endorse a website. There is no Rice University edition of the questionnaire to find, which is the whole answer to whether an official Rice Purity Test exists. A student newspaper printing a joke test in its April Fools’ issue is not an institution adopting one.
The orientation-week story
The most repeated claim about the test is that it was handed out during orientation week, so a new class could compare numbers before they had learned each other’s names. Accounts of it are numerous and consistent across decades of students, and nothing about the format contradicts them — a hundred concrete yes-or-no statements is an efficient way for strangers to find out who they are sitting next to. But it is recollection, not record. Treat it as the well-attested campus custom it is rather than a documented programme.
Why is it called the Rice Purity Test?
After the university, and after nothing else. William Marsh Rice endowed the institution in Houston that carries his name, its student newspaper printed the documents above, and the list that spread from that campus kept the campus’s name the way a recipe keeps the name of the town it came from.
The word is read the other way often enough that it is worth answering plainly: the name is not a reference to rice the food, and it is not a reference to anyone’s ethnicity. Nothing on the 100-statement list asks about race, nationality, religion or background — the statements are about romance, sex, substances, parties and trouble with the law, and all 100 are readable in order if you want to check that for yourself rather than take our word for it.
Why the name outlived the campus
Every copy that spread carried the name with it, and the name is the only part of the test that never drifted. The wording changed as sites re-typed each other, the length settled at 100, the audience moved from an American campus to a short-video app with a much younger crowd — and it is still called the Rice Purity Test, at a distance of a century from a newspaper survey of 119 students.
Rice Purity Test Kit is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Rice University.
Questions people actually ask
Did Rice University create the Rice Purity Test?
Not as an institution. The documented connection runs through the student newspaper, The Rice Thresher: a ten-question survey of 119 women reported in March 1924, and a 150-question test printed in the April Fools' issue of 1988. The university has never published or administered the list as a university document.
Why is it called the Rice Purity Test?
Because it circulated at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and the name travelled with the copies. The rice in the name is the university, not the grain — a confusion common enough that people search for it.
Is the test given during orientation at Rice?
Students have described it as an orientation-week ritual for decades, and those accounts are consistent, but they are first-hand recollection rather than an official record. No university programme lists it.
Is this site affiliated with Rice University?
No. Rice Purity Test Kit has no connection to Rice University, is not endorsed by it, and publishes the 100-item list as a copy of a questionnaire nobody owns.