[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
I hope to not take this thread into the much trotted direction of table naming conventions, but how do you deal with conflicting field names with your method? Are you using a bunch of ASses (that doesn't look right ;-P)?
On the contrary, my brain is the size of a small cheerio, and yet this naming convention just makes sense. The table is a collection of students, while the field stores the data for one individual instance of the table. Basically, theres one students table (a table which contains many students) and many student_id fields (a field which contains one student_id).