Can you append a list to a dictionary?

Question

So i need to create a list which will save the users inputs (a name and their 3 scores) and that will then append this information to one of 3 files. I tried doing this by appending the data to a list and then the list to a dictionary but this doesn't seem to work. I am really new to python so would really appreciate any help. This is my code so far;

dict1 = {}
dict2 = {}
dict3 = {}
list1 = []
list2 =[]
list3 =[]

def main():
    name= input ('What is your name?')
    for i in range(0,3)
        score = input("Enter your score: ")
        clss =input('which class?')
        if clss==1:
            list1.append (name, score)
        elif clss==2:
            list2.append (name, score)
        elif clss==3:
            list3.append (name, score)

Here i want to append the list to one of 3 dictionaries depending on the class

def loop():
    x=input('Do you want to make an entry?')
    if x=='Yes':
        main()
    elif x=='No':
        sys.exit(0)  

loop()

Answer 1

You need to have lists in dictionary to be able to append to them. You can do something like:

scores = {"class1": [], "class2": [], "class3": []} 

def main():
    name= input ('What is your name?')
    for i in range(0,3)
        score = input("Enter your score: ")
        clss =input('which class?')
        if clss==1:
            scores["class1"].append({"name": name, "score": score}) 
        elif clss==2:
            scores["class2"].append({"name": name, "score": score}) 
        elif clss==3:
            scores["class3"].append({"name": name, "score": score}) 
    print scores

Answer 2

Have you tried to use defaultdict ? Example from the python docs:

>>> s = 'mississippi'
>>> d = defaultdict(int)
>>> for k in s:
...     d[k] += 1
...
>>> d.items()
[('i', 4), ('p', 2), ('s', 4), ('m', 1)]

You can see another example of using defaultdict here