Most Popular QB Reader Subjects

Anything that's on topic but doesn't fit elsewhere, including related events that might be of interest to quizbowl players.
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thedoge
Lulu
Posts: 62
Joined: Thu Jul 16, 2020 10:45 am

Most Popular QB Reader Subjects

Post by thedoge »

Using the last two months of qbreader data, I've generated a report showing the most popular subjects per difficulty played on qbreader.

The results can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1255227481

The %-of-difficulty tab shows how popular each subcategory is at each difficulty level, and the %-of-subcategory tab shows how frequently people are studying that category at each difficulty. (If this is a bit confusing, look at where the totals add up to 100%. That may help.)

Some results I notice:
- Literature and History dominate, with history becoming even more popular than literature at harder difficulties
- Science is noticeably understudied compared to the other big 3 categories
- Religion, Philosophy, and Social Science (but not mythology!) are pretty unpopular
- There seems to be 4 main "groups" of difficulties people like to study: 1 (middle school), 2-4/2-5 (high school), 6-8 (college), and 9-10 (please stop studying this)

I'm not really sure what this data means other than for game theory purposes (i.e. get good at rmpss and science if you want to beat people), but the data is interesting and numerous and I figured others would be interested in taking a look.

EDIT: to clarify, this data only refers to when people play random difficulties/random categories, and in particular does not include database searches or people who play single sets/single packets.
Geoffrey Wu
NNHS '21 | Columbia '25
creator of qbreader.org
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