# New Direct Access Grading

We’ve been cooking up something big here at SIMnet this summer. On Friday we’re releasing new Access projects that grade directly as a database!

Access is a bit different from the other SIMnet *Microsoft Office* applications. In the background, most *Office* applications keep their files in a format called *xml*. Our SIMnet Projects grading has been based on these *xml* files. But Access doesn’t use that standard. Our original solution to this peculiarity was to have students convert their project file to an Excel spreadsheet before grading. While this solution provided a valuable teaching asset to effectively learning Access, we’ve been pushing ourselves to provide an even better user experience.

So we went back to the drawing board. And we’re delighted with the results! We can now grade your student’s database more accurately than ever before. We can assess **relationships**, **forms**, **reports**, **queries**, and **tables** in ways that were previously unaccessible. Everyone wins in the deal. Instructors know that they are more accurately assessing their student’s capabilities and students no longer have to rely on correctly exporting their data to get project steps correct.

On this Friday we will release the first 4 projects to grade student’s database directly:

* In Practice Access 2013 Ch 1 – Guided Project 1-2 (Upload .accdb)
* In Practice Access 2013 Ch 2 – Improve It Project 2-7 (Upload .accdb)
* In Practice Access 2013 Ch 3 – Independent Project 3-6 (Upload .accdb)
* In Practice Access 2013 Ch 4 – Independent Project 4-4 (Upload .accdb)

In early August we will release a project for each of the first four chapters of the A Skills Approach Access textbook:

* Skills Approach Access 2013 Ch 1 – Skill Review 1.1 (Upload .accdb)
* Skills Approach Access 2013 Ch 2 – Challenge Yourself 2.3 (Upload .accdb)
* Skills Approach Access 2013 Ch 3 – Challenge Yourself 3.3 (Upload .accdb)
* Skills Approach Access 2013 Ch 4 – Skill Review 4.1 (Upload .accdb)

We’ve made a change in the way that projects display in order to make it clear if you’ve assigned a project that is graded directly in Access or requires an import to Excel. We annotated 2013 Access projects with (Upload .xlsx) or (Upload .accdb) in the project title.

![aerb.png](/files/LgNWF6EEpkkr57EjRHNc)


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