Access 2010: How to Handle Compund Primary Keys in Datasheets and Forms

Question

I am trying to design a database to ease with my grading process. I want to add assignments to the database, add questions to each assignment, and weight the questions as percentages of the whole. Students commonly make the same mistakes, so I want to be able to also track reasons for docking credit for each question and the amount docked so I can simply link that student's assignment submission to the mistakes they made. The goal is to be able to grade students equally with a single query, which gives a student a zero if they did not submit and a grade accounting for all the deductions earned if they did.

I have designed the table structure as shown in the picture below:

The tool I have available to me is Access 2010 (with which the above relationship diagram was made). I am trying to step beyond describing tables to building forms to help me populate them. The problem is that, as a beginner, I cannot figure out how to get Access to work with the compound primary keys. I cannot figure out how to get any sort of form to link to multiple fields, or how to get multiple inputs to link to each other so I can set up decent drop-down lists for combo boxes, or even how to get the data sheet views for the tables to use combo boxes to make these foreign keys work.

At this point, I can only see two options: changing these tables with compound primary keys to have different fields for primary keys and setting compound unique constraints on the current primary keys (which I have no idea how to do in Access 2010), or giving up on the whole idea and switching back to laboriously attempting everything in Excel.

Does anybody have any ideas on how I could:

• easily change the table structure to make forms work cleanly and easily for data entry and manipulation?
• get the forms and datasheets to work with the current compound key paradigm?

Answer 1

This is an image of what I am suggesting, the primary key contents are copied to a new key. The primary key can then be deleted.