Hey.

You could simplify this by doing:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `theTableName`(...)

Then MySQL will simply ignore the statement if the table already exists.


That said, when you start creating tables "on-the-fly" using actual data as identifiers, you've usually gone down a weird path. - The data should go into tables, not become actual tables.

From what you've posted, it almost looks like your creating one table per student?
If so, then that is not a good way to deal with this. A better way would be to create one table to store all the students in.