Spickmich.de

» see spickmich.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

german secondary school culture was never a surface i had access to. by 2007 i was already past school, finishing comp eng in ankara, the german gymnasium ratings for math and physics teachers were on the other side of europe from anything i would log into. spickmich was for the kids who needed to share a six-point grade on frau müller's chemistry class with the rest of their gymnasium. that was not me.

three students at the university of cologne built the site in spring 2007. tino keller, manuel weisbrod and philipp weidenhiller had the idea after talking about why teachers had no public rating layer the way restaurants did. the registration model required entering your school name from a verified list and your class year, then you could open a page on any teacher at that school and grade them on a six-point scale across categories like technical competence and classroom motivation.

the scale itself was the german school grade scale, one through six with one as the best. that detail made the site feel native to the audience, you were grading the teachers using the same numbers the teachers had been grading you with for years. registered users crossed 800,000 within 17 months of launch, which against the german secondary-school age cohort of around 8 million was a real penetration number for a free site with no major marketing budget.

~ the record ~

~ the lawsuit ~

the teachers' unions started complaining inside the first year. the basic grievance was that anyone could register with a false school name and grade a teacher they had never met, the names of the teachers were entered by students and so a single teacher might appear under three or four spelling variants with different ratings on each. data protection regulators in nrw and lower saxony filed concerns. several teachers personally sued under privacy law.

the lawsuit that mattered went all the way up. the bundesgerichtshof (federal court of justice) ruled on 23 june 2009 that anonymous teacher ratings on spickmich did not violate the personality rights of the educators. the school-context evaluation was a legitimate public expression, the federal court found, the personality-right protection did not extend to professional conduct in a public school. the bundesverfassungsgericht (constitutional court) declined to take subsequent appeals in 2010.

the bgh decision was the high-water mark of the site's public profile. spickmich had also won the german negative-press big brother award in 2008 for its data-handling practices, which the operators effectively ignored. the legal vindication a year later left the site free to keep operating but also took the controversy oxygen out of the project.

~ the postmortem ~

the founders had moved on by the early 2010s. spickmich kept running with reduced staffing alongside schulradar.de, the april 2008 sister site that let parents and teachers themselves view and contribute to school-level reviews. neither site got significant feature work after 2011. the german teen audience moved to facebook and then to whatsapp, the school-context ratings were no longer the social event they had been in 2008.

12 august 2014 both sites went offline. no operator statement was published. the registered user accounts and the rating archive were not migrated anywhere. seven and a half years from launch to quiet shutdown, with one federal court of justice ruling on free speech in education tucked into the middle of the run.

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