The Griffin is Back…Bringing the Immorality Quotient With it

In 1915, for the first graduating class of Reed, The Reed College Annual was published. This student-made senior yearbook contained a whopping 168 pages featuring a vast variety of sections including entire pages dedicated to each senior and their various research and work. However, in the editions to come, many of these pages would be cut due to space limitations. For example, introductions for every single faculty member and photo spreads of club activities were featured throughout the 1920’s. After one additional, less dense issue that did not share the name of its predecessor and a three-year break in 1920, the yearbook was officially branded as the Griffin. This is the name the yearbook still operates under to this day, publishing its self-proclaimed 99th issue this year. 

Last year, the Griffin returned after a lengthy and indefinite hiatus in the form of a paperback yearbook. Assembled in one semester, it contains over 70 pages of content including senior photos, superlatives, photospreads depicting student life, and the infamous Immorality Quotient, essentially Reed’s coked-up version of the Rice Purity Test. The Immorality Quotient (IQ for short) was initially only published in the Reed Student Handbook, which to the Quest’s current knowledge last existed in print in 2015. Different heinous and absurd Reed-related acts are sorted into categories roughly based on the Seven Deadly Sins, with participants checking off everything they have done and adding up the total number of points to see which campus celebrity they are, the identities of which the Quest is not going to spoil for those interested in completing the quotient.

This year, the Griffin plans to return with an updated version of the IQ, last updated in the 2022-2023 academic year, in print. Prior, a new addition of the IQ was made in 2019-2020 and before that in 2014-2015, then yearly dating back to 2007-2008. All of these versions are published online on the website of alum Violet Shemitz ‘11. Print versions of the IQ date back even further than this to at least the 1998-1999 edition of the student handbook. The Quest was unable to uncover any versions dating before this time. 

“I remember that every year when a new handbook came out (and they used to be really nice-looking things, professionally bound) people would immediately flip to the IQ pages and start figuring out their scores and comparing with their friends” Shemitz stated.

In regards to her intentions for digitizing the IQ, Shemitz said “I first put it online two years after I'd graduated from Reed, but I didn't write anything at the time about why I'd done so – presumably just to make it easier for my friends to see how their scores would evolve over the years, and to make it easier for us in the Reed diaspora to keep up with newer editions as they were published. Also, I mean, it's a lot easier to click checkboxes than to keep track of your score in your head. Math is hard, let's go sinning.”As previously stated, the Immorality Quotient draws a comparison to the Rice Purity Test, where test takers subtract a point for a total of 100 for each impure task they check off. Shemitz mentioned that, “It seems likely that the IQ is somehow descended from the famous Rice Purity Test, or that they share a common ancestor. It may have migrated over in the 80's or 90's or even earlier…But I think it would be a serious research project to try to uncover the details after all these decades.”