Assign value to external variables from awk

Hello
I have a text file with the next pattern

Name,Year,Grade1,Grade2,Grade3
Name,Year,Grade1,Grade2,Grade3
Name,Year,Grade1,Grade2,Grade3

I want to assign to external variables the grades using the awk method.
After i read the file line by line in order to get the grades i use this

grade1=echo $line | awk -F, '{ print $3 }'
grade2=echo $line | awk -F, '{ print $4 }'
grade3=echo $line | awk -F, '{ print $5 }'

Is there a way to assign values returned by awk to external variables from inside the awk command?
I know the next code wont work but something like this

echo $line | awk -F, '{ grade1= $3; grade2= $4; grade3= $5; }'

Thanks

No. But maybe you need something like this:

% cat testfile                                                         
Name,Year,Grade1,Grade2,Grade3
Name,Year,Grade1,Grade2,Grade3
Name,Year,Grade1,Grade2,Grade3
app@m11 ~/tmp
% cat testfile | tr ',' ' ' | while read name year grade1 grade2 grade3
do
  echo $grade1
  echo $grade2
  echo $grade3
done
Grade1
Grade2
Grade3
Grade1
Grade2
Grade3
Grade1
Grade2
Grade3

Of course, as your input contains three grades per line, you might want to store all of them in one go.

$ cat SomeScript
unset grade1 grade2 grade3

while IFS=, read name year g1 g2 g3; do
  grade1[${#grade1[@]}]="$g1"
  grade2[${#grade2[@]}]="$g2"
  grade3[${#grade3[@]}]="$g3"
done < inputfile

echo "First Grade 1:"
echo ${grade1[0]}

echo "Second Grade 2:"
echo ${grade2[1]}

echo "All Grade 3's:"
echo ${grade3[@]}

$ ./SomeScript
First Grade 1:
Grade1
Second Grade 2:
Grade2
All Grade 3's:
Grade3 Grade3 Grade3