How the Wabiro Purity Score is calculated

The purity score is a game with a fixed rulebook. Fifty questions, fifty yeses or noes, one number. Here is exactly how the number is made, so you can argue about it with your friends on solid ground.

The questions

The 50 questions are original to Wabiro and were written to be answerable by anyone over 18 in any country: no substances named, no sexual content spelled out, nothing you could not read aloud at a dinner table. Every question is a have you ever and every answer is yes or no. There are no “sometimes”: if it happened once, it is a yes.

They are grouped in six categories, and the categories carry different weights because they contain different numbers of questions:

How a yes becomes a number

Every question is a protective item: a “no” is worth the full 3 points, a “yes” is worth 0. Your category score is your points in that category divided by the maximum, times 100 — in plain terms, the percentage of questions in that category you said no to.

Your purity score is the weighted average of the six category scores, rounded to the nearest whole number. Because the weights follow the question counts, this comes out very close to “100 minus the percentage of yeses”, with the rounding done once at the end so a 49.5 never silently becomes a 50 in one category and a 49 in another.

The five bands

The band names your result profile. The neighbouring band (towards the middle of the scale) is shown as your “also close to”, so a 79 and an 81 share a second identity even though the line falls between them.

Percentiles

When enough people have completed the same version of the test, your result shows where you sit compared to other Wabiro users (“lower than 72% of people”). We only show this once at least 200 completions exist for that version, and it is computed from an anonymous distribution of scores — never from anyone’s answers. Wabiro users are self-selected: the percentile compares you with people who took this test, not with a country or a generation.

What it is not

It is not a measure of worth, maturity, health or morality, and the words we use for the bands are jokes with a scoring system behind them. A low score is a life; a high score is a life too. Your answers never leave your device: if you share your result, only the score, the band and the category breakdown travel with it.

Versioning

This is version 1 of the purity test. If a question, a weight or a band ever changes, a new version is published and older results keep the version they were computed with; percentiles are always computed within a single version.