Let me tell you what course selection actually looks like at a German university.
It's week three of the semester. You open TUMonline, or LSF, or Campus Online, or whatever portal your uni uses. You see a list of courses. Each one has a name, a module number, maybe a PDF syllabus from 2019. You pick one based on vibes, maybe the title sounds interesting, maybe it fits your schedule, maybe a friend took it two semesters ago and said it was "fine."
Six weeks later you're sitting in a lecture wondering why nobody told you this course has a notoriously brutal exam with a 35% pass rate and the professor reads off slides for 90 minutes every week.
This isn't a personal failure. It's a structural gap. When I started talking to students at universities across Germany, KIT, RWTH, LMU, TU Berlin, and others, every single person had the same story.
So where do students actually go when they want real information about a course?
The Real Landscape
WhatsApp and Telegram Groups
This is where most of the honest information lives. Every program has them. You find the group for "KIT Informatik Master" or "LMU BWL Fachschaft," ask your question, and hope someone who took the course two semesters ago is still in the chat and actually replies.
The problem: it's ephemeral. Answers disappear. You can't search for them. And if you're not in the right group, which you often aren't as a first-semester student, the information might as well not exist.
Subreddits like r/KIT, r/LMU_Munich, r/TUMunich, and a few others have some useful threads. Students share honest opinions here, and some posts age well.
But Reddit is built for questions, not structured reviews. You'll find "is Advanced ML worth it?" asked three times across different threads with contradictory answers and no way to aggregate them. There's no rating system, no course catalog structure, no way to know if the answer still applies.
Studydrive and Studocu
Great for lecture slides, old exams, and summaries. Zero course reviews. These platforms solved the materials problem, not the decision-making problem.
RateMyProfessors
Built for American universities. German coverage is so sparse it's barely worth opening. The few entries that exist are years old.
Your University's Own Evaluation System
Most German universities run internal course evaluations. Students fill them out at the end of semester. Here's the catch: the results are private. The professor sees them. You don't. They were never designed to help you make decisions — they were designed to help faculty improve courses. Useful, but invisible to students.
Random Forums and Facebook Groups
Still exist. Still get used. Often the only place you find niche program feedback. Posts from 2016, threads that never got a response, advice that may or may not still apply. You take what you can get.
What's Actually Missing
Notice what none of these have in common: structure, discoverability, and persistence.
A review you write in a WhatsApp group helps the five people currently online. A review you write on a platform built for course discovery helps every student who searches that course name for the next three years.
Students have been solving a structural problem with informal workarounds. It works, kind of, if you know the right people and ask the right questions at the right time. If you're a first-semester student with no network yet, you're flying blind.
What AskYourClass Is
AskYourClass is a course discovery and peer review platform built specifically for university students.
It covers 25,000+ courses across 21 universities — TUM, LMU, TU Berlin, KIT, RWTH Aachen, Uni Stuttgart, and more. Students can leave reviews, share experiences, rate courses, and find what they're actually looking for before they register.
In the last 90 days, nearly 6,000 unique students visited the platform. The most-searched course was viewed over 400 times in that window alone. Students are clearly looking for this information. The platform exists to give it to them.
"I spent a whole week in Telegram groups trying to figure out if Patterns in Software Engineering was worth it. Wish I'd found this earlier."
"Ended up dropping a seminar three weeks in because the workload was completely different from what I expected. One honest review would have saved me the spot and the stress."
The difference isn't just features. It's that every review stays. It's searchable. It's tied to the actual course. Someone writing a review today is helping a student making a decision in 2027.
The Gap Is Still Real
Here's the honest part: the platform is early. 30+ contributors have left posts and ratings so far. That's not nothing, but it's also not the thousands of reviews that would make it the definitive source.
Which is exactly why this post exists.
Every review you leave makes the platform more useful for every student who comes after you. You've had the experience. You've formed the opinion. The only question is whether you write it down somewhere it can actually be found.
Leave a review on AskYourClass →
It takes five minutes. Future students will thank you for it.