Question

I have a probably quite basic question: I am currently setting up a database for students and their marks in my courses. I currently have two main classes in my models.py: Student (containing their name, id, email address etc) and Course (containing an id, the year it is running in and the assessment information – for example “Essay” “40%” “Presentation” “10%” “Exam” “50%”). And, of course, Student has a ManyToMany field so that I can assign students to courses and vice versa. I have to be able to add and modify these things.

Now, obviously, I would like to be able to add the marks for the students in the different assignments (which are different from course to course). As I am very unexperienced in database programming, I was hoping one of you could give me a tip how to set this up within my models.

Thanks,
Tobi

Answer 1

Perhaps the way to go about it is to have a separate class for assignment, something like this.

class Assignment(models.Model):
    ASSIGNMENT_TYPES = (
        ('essay', "Essay"),
        ...
    )
    ASSIGNMENT_GRADES = (
        ('a+', "A+"),
        ('a', "A"),
        ...
    )
    student = models.ForeignKey("Student")
    course = models.ForeignKey("Course")
    assignment_type = models.CharField(choices=ASSIGNMENT_TYPES, max_length=15, default='essay')
    progress = models.IntegerField()
    grade = models.CharField(choices=ASSIGNMENT_GRADES, max_length=3, default="a+")

This way you have one assignment connected to one student and one course. It can be modified relatively easy if you have multiple students per one assignment, by adding another class (for example StudentGroup) and including it in the model.

Hope that this helps 🙂