AO3 Purity Test – Check Your Fandom Score Instantly
The AO3 Purity Test is a 100-question quiz that scores your fanfiction and fandom experience from 0 to 100. You start at 100 and lose one point for every item you have done. Unlike the original Rice Purity Test, a lower score is the one people brag about.
Check every box that applies. No account, no sign-up, and your score appears the second you finish.
Check all that apply. Your score updates live. No data is saved to your account.
What Is the AO3 Purity Test?
The AO3 Purity Test is a fan-made checklist quiz that measures how deep your fanfiction experience runs. It borrows the format of the Rice Purity Test — 100 items, one point each, scored out of 100 — but replaces every question with something specific to fandom life: what you have read, what you have written, how you use tags, and how far into the archive you have gone.
It is sometimes typed as the a03 purity test, since the “3” and the letter O trip people up in the same way they do in the site name itself. Same test either way.
The appeal is the same as the original. A number on its own means very little, but comparing numbers with people who share your references is genuinely funny. Someone who has read a 300,000-word slow burn in one sitting and someone who has never opened a fic will end up hundreds of points apart, and both of them will want to talk about it.
How Is the AO3 Purity Test Scored?
The scoring is deliberately simple and there is no answer key.
- Everyone starts at 100 points
- Each box you check subtracts exactly one point
- Every item is worth the same, whether it is leaving kudos or binding a fic into a physical book
- Your final score is 100 minus the number of boxes checked
- Lower means more fandom experience; higher means less
There is no weighting and no scoring key, because the test has no way to rank one fandom experience against another. It is a count, not an assessment.
What Do the 100 Questions Cover?
The question set runs across five areas, moving from things almost everyone has done toward things only the deeply embedded have.
- Reading — word counts, unfinished WIPs, rereads, 2am binges, the fic that made you cry
- Writing and creation — posting, orphaning, abandoned drafts, podfic, fanart
- Community — kudos, comments, bookmarks, exchanges, Discord servers, discourse
- Content and tags — ratings, archive warnings, tropes, rarepairs, filter habits
- Platform and fandom life — site skins, downloads, saved searches, tag wrangling
Nothing in the test asks about your own life. Every item is about what you have read, written, or done inside fandom spaces, which is what separates it from the original.
What Does Your AO3 Purity Test Score Mean?
There is no official grading system, but scores tend to fall into recognizable bands.
- 100 – 90 — Canon Only: You know fanfiction exists. That is roughly where it ends.
- 89 – 70 — Casual Reader: You read when a fandom grabs you, mostly the highly-kudosed stuff on page one.
- 69 – 50 — Deep in the Tags: You have filters, opinions, and at least one bookmark you would not show anyone.
- 49 – 30 — Fandom Veteran: Reading, writing, and community all in play. You have survived at least one discourse cycle.
- 29 – 0 — No Life Before Fic: Rarepair tags cleared, exchanges missed, EPUBs downloaded. Fandom is not a hobby at this point.
Your score is a snapshot of exposure, not a ranking of anybody’s taste.
Is a Low AO3 Purity Test Score Bad?
No — and this is the biggest difference in how the two tests are read. On the original Rice Purity Test, a low score is often treated as something to explain away. In fandom, a low AO3 score signals fluency: you have read widely, been around a while, and know how the archive actually works. Most people posting their results are competing downward, not upward.
Neither direction says anything about you as a person. A high score usually just means you found fandom recently.
What Is AO3?
AO3 stands for Archive of Our Own, a nonprofit fanfiction archive run by the Organization for Transformative Works. It was created in 2008 and entered open beta in November 2009, after fans grew frustrated with commercial platforms that monetized fanwork without protecting the people making it.
It ran in open beta for more than sixteen years, finally exiting in April 2026 with over 10 million registered users and more than 17 million fanworks spread across more than 77,000 fandoms. It won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2019. The site carries no ads, takes no venture funding, and is maintained entirely by volunteers and donations.
That structure is why AO3 developed the vocabulary this test is built on — the tagging system, the archive warnings, the rating labels, the culture around kudos and comments. None of it exists in the same form anywhere else.
How Is This Different from the Rice Purity Test?
The scoring is identical. The subject matter shares nothing. The Rice Purity Test asks about your own life experiences — relationships, substances, run-ins with the law — while this one asks about your reading and writing. Someone can score 95 on one and 20 on the other with no contradiction at all.
We break the comparison down properly in how the AO3 test differs from the Rice Purity Test, category by category. If you want the original instead, the Rice Purity Test is here, and you can read all 100 original questions before you start.
Prefer taking a test with someone else? There is also a 50-question version built for couples.
Is This Test Affiliated with AO3?
No. This quiz is unofficial and fan-made. It is not created, endorsed, reviewed, or run by Archive of Our Own or the Organization for Transformative Works, and it has no connection to either. It does not link to your AO3 account, read your history, or touch the archive in any way. It is a checklist on this page and nothing more.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is a 100-question fan-made quiz that scores your fanfiction and fandom experience from 0 to 100. You start at 100 and subtract one point for each item you have done. The questions cover reading, writing, community participation, tags, and how you use the archive.
Start at 100 and subtract one point per checked box. Every item is worth the same. Your score is 100 minus the total number of boxes you checked, and there is no answer key or correct result.
Neither. In practice, fandom treats a lower score as a sign of experience rather than something to hide, which is the reverse of how people read the original Rice Purity Test. It is not a judgment in either direction.
Around three to five minutes. There are 100 checkboxes, no typing, and no required fields.
Yes. No account, no email, and no personal details. Your score is added to an anonymous running total so the site can show overall statistics, and nothing stored can connect a score back to you. There is more detail on how this site handles test data.
No. It is unofficial and fan-made, with no affiliation with Archive of Our Own or the Organization for Transformative Works. It does not connect to your AO3 account or reading history.
The same thing. “a03” is a common typo for AO3, since the letter O and the digit zero look alike in most fonts.
As many times as you want. Nothing from a previous attempt is stored or remembered.
No. You do not need an account anywhere, including AO3. Most of the questions will make sense to anyone who reads fanfiction on any platform.
Whatever number you land on, it is a record of what you have read and made, and there is no version of that worth being embarrassed about. Screenshot it, post it, argue with your friends about whose is lower — that is the entire point.
