Hi 
I’m a parent of a UCB 2026 admitted student (he accepted). He received a request for LORs and submitted them. During that time, I came across this extremely informative video of the LOR (and admissions) process, a presentation of research findings by Berkeley faculty hosted by the Berkeley Institute of Data Science. One interesting bit of information I found promising was that there are two readers of the application. The first round is when applicant is marked as “likely possible” and a small percentage of those are invited to submit LOR. Only the second reader reads the LOR, so in my mind I felt my son made it through the first hurdle, his application will be seen by the second reader and will have an added advantage of a LOR (assuming it’s a positive letter!) that can influence the reader in a positive direction.
(edited to add: pls note the study was conducted during the 2016-17 admission cycle and sorry didn’t know the video would display so largely here! 
)
Here’s the link to the YouTube video:
Letters of recommendation in Berkeley undergraduate admissions
Source:
Letters of recommendation in Berkeley undergraduate admissions: Program evaluation and natural language processing
Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science
https://bids.berkeley.edu/events/letters-of-recommendation-in-Berkeley-undergraduate-admissions
