Frequency list

In the context of quiz bowl, a frequency list is a list which contains the number of times specific topics have appeared in quiz bowl. Some frequency lists contain only the name of topics and their frequency, while others may have additional information on each topic.

NAQT publishes frequency lists for purchase in the categories of Literature, Non-Fiction, music, and Art (all visual). In 2011, HSAPQ published a list of over 20000 answer lines from their questions sets that can be seen on this public Google spreadsheet as announced on this thread. Additionally, you can look up "most important (subject matter)" or "100 most famous works of literature" on a search engine to approximate a frequency list.

These lists also provide an advantage over regular list studying in that the frequencies give teams a better idea of how important it is to learn each item on the list, and perhaps how important the given works are generally.

Disadvantages of frequency lists include:

• the easy potential for the lists to go out of date (NAQT also lets teams purchase updates to the list for a lower price than the initial list)
• the lists may represent recent (and thereby important-to-learn) trends in the canon as having the same frequency as older works that are rarely asked anymore
• inclusion of seemingly non-academic material, such as children's literature on the literature list
• non-inclusion of important and frequently-asked about works due to inconsistencies in NAQT's topic tagging system
• incentive for binary association learning or otherwise discouraging deeper learning of a topic