A purity test is a self-graded survey that assesses the participants' supposed degree of innocence in worldly matters (sex, drugs, deceit, and other activities assumed to be vices), generally on a percentage scale with 100% being the most and 0% being the least pure.
[3] The Columbia University humor magazine, The Jester, reported in its October 1935 issue on a campus wide "purity test" conducted at Barnard College in 1935.
The issue of The Jester was briefly censored, with distribution curtailed until the director of activities at the university could review the article.
"[4] In 1936, The Indian Express reported that students at Toronto University were "under-going a 'purity test', which took "the form of twenty very personal questions, designed to determine the state of their morals and their 'purity ratio'.
[7] In 1976, a teacher at La Grange High School in Texas was fired for distributing a 1966 purity test, which had appeared in the Ask Ann Landers column, to her students.
First written before 1980 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Baker House, the first incarnation had two parallel versions, 100 questions each; one for male, and one for female.
The next iteration (247 questions, written at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983) heralded the merging of the gendered versions, making it unisex.