Purity Test Genesis/History:
- Version 1 (100) Created at MIT's Baker House.
- Two parallel versions; one for male, and one for female. Not much is
known about this version. It was ported to CMU by ps in 1982.
- Version 2 (247) Spring 1983:
- CMU/jb, pd, kr, ps, ts, mt, et al.
- Expanded to 247 questions. This marked the beginning of
the unisex versions. The story goes that they intended it to be
250 questions, but got tired that night and said "we'll think
of three more tomorrow", and tomorrow never got there.
- Version 3.3C.1 (400) on 05-Dec-1984
- First formal release general of this test, version 3.xx. All
former versions were short-lived and tended to be bug-ridden.
Does not discriminate against gays or bi's. Good correspondence
of scores (especially in the higher score ranges) between this
version and version 2. Added Genesis/History section.
- Version 3.4 (400) on 29-Jan-1985
- Internal version; never released. Source code accidentally
destroyed, much to the consternation of one of the authors.
Cleaned up many bugs. Added sections: Disclaimer of Liability,
Instructions for Use, Scoring, and Warranty Information.
- Version 3.5 (400) on 10-Apr-1985
- Rebuilt from the 3.3C.1 source and the 3.4 (only surviving
copy) Xerox X9700 laser printer hardcopy. Cleaned up same bugs
in 3.4; wiped out a duplicate question. Added in verbose
history section.
- Version 3.5A (400) on 13-Apr-1985:
- CMU/da, fa, tc, no, dt, sv, rz, et al
- Found that we had 431 questions instead of 400.
- Version 3.5B (400) on 18-Mar-1986:
- Yale (Pierson College)/ as
- Intermediate release, with footnotes integrated into main body
of text and some grammatical errors cleaned up. Begun in
Fall, 1985; finished in April for the benefit of a friend at
MIT (where it all began), who hadn't seen any versions except
the antique Version 1.
- Version 3.5C (400) on 17-Jan-1988:
- Yale (Pierson College)/mmd (CLARINET@YALEVM)
- Grammatical errors corrected. Introduction and history
cleaned up.
- Version 4.0 (500) on 23-April-1988:
- Yale (Silliman College)/dfc, ad, dcg, mlm,
- and Dartmouth (Alpha Theta)/alb. Original 400-question version
expanded to 500 questions.
- Version 4.0W (500) on 31-Dec-1994:
- New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
- Converted the familiar 500 question version into a HyperText
document and let it loose on the World Wide Web.
http://www.nmt.edu/~kscott/purity/purity.html
K. Scott Rowe - kscott@mailhost.nmt.edu