The VOX cooking show Das perfekte Dinner began on 6 March 2006. Each candidate hosts the others for one evening, and at the end the guests give the evening 0 to 10 points. By March 2026 there had been 4,796 hosting evenings. Full points were given 32 times.
On average, the winner of a week has 35 points. The guests who give the points are themselves competing for that win.
In a poll for Bild am Sonntag, published in June 2019, the institute Emnid asked 1,009 people to grade the federal government with school grades. The cabinet received an average of 4 plus, 3.8. Only nine percent gave it a gut, good. Nobody gave it a sehr gut. 26 percent failed it.
In 2019 pupils in several German states protested that the mathematics Abitur had been too hard. Some started online petitions. Hamburg’s school authority decided to adjust the marking standard for this special case. The exams would be marked better than originally planned.
In Bavaria, after a petition, the ministry told the state parliament’s education committee that it saw no sign that the marking key needed to change. An official of the ministry said the general tenor was mostly that the exam had been anspruchsvoll, aber machbar, demanding but doable.
In Berlin’s upper secondary school, an exam still counts if more than a third of the students get mangelhaft, deficient, or worse. Only the principal can decide that a new exam must be written. The Berlin Senate explained the rule in October 2024, in answer to a question from a member of the state parliament.
In the metal and electrical industry of Baden-Württemberg, the collective agreement adds performance pay to base pay. Across a plant, the performance pay is to come to 15 percent of total base pay.
In 2014 the Federal Labor Court ruled on who must prove what. An employer who rates an employee below the 15 percent must prove that the rating is justified. An employee who wants a rating above it must prove that he earned it.
After each half of the Bundesliga season, the football magazine kicker publishes its Rangliste des deutschen Fußballs, the ranking of German football. It places the players by position in classes, with Weltklasse, world class, at the top and Internationale Klasse, international class, below it.
In the ranking of July 2024, the world-class category for goalkeepers read: Weltklasse: Keiner. World class: nobody. The top goalkeeper, Gregor Kobel, was rated international class. No central defender was rated world class either. The winter ranking of January 2024 had also listed nobody as a world-class goalkeeper.
The Standing Conference of education ministers publishes the Abitur grades of every state. In the figures for 2025, 8,255 pupils finished with the top average of 1.0. That was 3.1 percent of all who passed. In the figures for the school year 2013/14, 4,569 of 324,431 successful candidates had a 1.0, about 1.4 percent.
The comparison has limits. The 2025 figures are provisional. Those for Baden-Württemberg are from 2023/24, and Bavaria had few candidates because of its return to the nine-year Gymnasium. The states also differ. In 2025 the average grade was 2.13 in Thuringia and 2.46 in Schleswig-Holstein.
The federal regulation on civil service careers sets guide values for appraisals. Among the officials appraised in a pay grade, the share soll bei der höchsten Note zehn Prozent und bei der zweithöchsten Note 20 Prozent nicht überschreiten, should not exceed ten percent for the top grade and 20 percent for the second. For fairness in a single case, each limit may be exceeded by up to five percentage points.
The limits were once looser. In 2008 the Federal Administrative Court described an older rule that allowed 15 and 35 percent. In the case before it, the Federal Intelligence Service had set its own limits at 5 and 15 percent. The service said that its new rules were meant to counter Noteninflation, grade inflation.
After big football matches, German newspapers publish an Einzelkritik, an individual review. Each player gets a school grade from 1 to 6 and a one-line verdict. After Bayern Munich’s Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid in April 2012, the Munich Abendzeitung gave goalkeeper Manuel Neuer a 1: Im Elferschießen dann der Held des Abends, then the hero of the evening in the penalty shoot-out. Philipp Lahm got a 2: Kurbelte viele Angriffe nach vorne an, got many attacks going.
German amateur bands, from village brass bands to fire brigade bands, perform before juries in Wertungsspiele, rated performances. The 2026 rules of the Saxon firefighters’ association are typical. Each piece is scored on ten criteria, from intonation to overall impression, up to 100 points. The band then receives a rating from fixed bands. Hervorragender Erfolg, outstanding success, needs 91 points or more. Plain Erfolg, success, covers 61 to 70 points. Below 60 points the band is recorded only as teilgenommen, took part.