Question

I have a database that has different grades per course (i.e. three homeworks for Course 1, two homeworks for Course 2, … ,Course N with M homeworks). How should I handle this as far as database design goes?

CourseID HW1  HW2 HW3
    1    100  99  100
    2    100  75  NULL

EDIT
I guess I need to rephrase my question. As of right now, I have two tables, Course and Homework. Homework points to Course through a foreign key. My question is how do I know how many homeworks will be available for each class?

Answer 1

Decompose the table into three different tables. One holds the courses, the second holds the homeworks, and the third connects them and stores the result.

Course:

CourseID CourseName
1        Foo

Homework:

HomeworkID HomeworkName HomeworkDescription
HW1        Bar          ...

Result:

CourseID HomeworkID Result
1        HW1        100