Data Calculation - Mailing list pgsql-sql

I need some help for which I could not find much help for within the
Postgres book I am looking at, or the online tutorial. I don't know if
this is even possible, but here goes...

I am writing for advice, as the method I followed is not the most
effecient, I think.

Scenario: Grading results. I have two tables set up - one with the
answerkey and one with the students results from a test:

answerkey:

question_number int,
answer varchar(2)

So something like this (select * from answerkey):

1 | 2 | 3 ...... | 30
------------------
A | B | C..... | D

Student results are similar as the answerkey table, but contain a unique
student id:

student_id | 1 | 2 | 3 .....
-------------------------
010019 | B | C | C ....
029393 | B | B | C.....

Currently, to calculate how each student did, within Perl, I obtain the
table results in an array and do an array calculation:

if ($student_answer->[$i] eq $correct_answer[$i-1]){$answer_correct++;}

This works fine and is quite fast, though could postgres be used to do
this faster?

The reason being is that once I have the number of correct answers for a
student, I then calculate the % score for each student, based on the
weight of the question (also in another table).

Now, all this data that Perl calculates is displayed for the end user in a
table. The user can also sort by a field, such as %.

Because Perl did the % calculations, I have to re-calculate everything and
dump it into a temporary table, to make sorting easier:

student_id, answer_correct, weights_score, percentage_score

Then, if the user wants to sort by the percentage field, I do a select *
from temp_answers order by $field.

This works fine, and of a class with 500 students, all this happens in
about 10 seconds.

I am new to the Postgres world, and am just wondering: is there any way I
can make Postgres do all the calculations, therefore, bypassing the need
to create a temporary table upon every lookup, just for sorting purposes?

A second scenario is this. I have a list of 12,000 students. The end user
selects what criteria to search for (ie. to look up students belonging in
a certain class and/or teacher). The select is fine and works, however,
then the user needs to be taken to a reports page, where this a different
Perl program running for each different report.

How do I pass this SQL statement to the perl programs? Currently, I select
the students that match the criteria and put their IDs into a temporary
table and pass the name of this table name to the other perl programs. Is
there a way to bypass this creation of a table?

Thank you very much for your time.

Ogden Nefix