No teacher rating in France

Not online, anyway. A French court cracked down on a teacher-rating site based in that country: Note2be.com. Like US-based sites RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com, Note2be encouraged students to grade and discuss their teachers' capabilities. The judges said the site "could no longer identify any teachers by name and told the site's owners they faced a $1,517 (1,000 euro) fine for every infraction," Reuters reports. Note2be encouraged rating in six categories: "how interesting, clear, fair, available, respectful and motivated" teachers were, and - like its US and UK counterparts, "it also set up a rankings system to promote France's top 10 teachers." As with most participatory sites, it was a two-edged sword, the downside being plenty of opportunity for libel and defamation and an upside that possibly gave public exposure to both bad and good teaching.