A court has ruled that schoolchildren may rate their teachers online, rejecting the case of a woman who argued that her rights had been infringed by pupils who gave her bad grades on a popular website.

The rights of the woman, a teacher of German and religion, had not been compromised by the ratings and pupils had a right to offer an opinion as long as they did not hinder her professionally, the German Federal Court of Justice found.

“The opinions expressed are neither abusive nor insulting,” the court said in a statement. “The plaintiff did not show that she had been harmed in any specific way.”

Collection, storage, and transmission of ratings by online portal spickmich.de was therefore permissible without the assent of the plaintiff, the court ruled.

The website allows students to award teachers marks on a scale from 1 (very good) to 6 (unsatisfactory), the same scale on which German pupils are graded. Categories assessed include “cool and funny”, “popular”, “motivated”, “human”, and “good teaching”.

The ruling will boost controversial websites such as Rate My Teacher in the UK, which operates a similar system.

This year more than one in ten teachers said that they were bullied by pupils and colleagues through text messages, e-mails and social networking sites.

A quarter of UK teachers said that they had had offensive messages posted about them on social networking sites such as Facebook or Rate My Teacher, according to the survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the Teacher Support Network.

The lawyers of the German teacher, who had been given a rating of 4.3 for her German teaching, argued that the site was unfair and inaccurate because users rate subjects anonymously.

This could lead to multiple ratings by the same person, as well as ratings by people with no connection to the school or teacher in question, they argued.

But the court said that in this case, the right of the individual to express an opinion outweighed these concerns.

The operators of the website welcomed the court’s ruling. “The judges clearly said that the teacher herself is not being rated, but rather her job performance. Therefore it’s allowed and students may express this criticism publicly online,” Tino Keller, the website’s editor-in-chief, said.

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