<p>
Considering that a teacher might be asked to write rec letters for DOZENS of students, it’s not unreasonable for the teacher to solicit input from the student. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A list of accomplishments is not a recommendation. The worst recs I have seen are those that tell me what I already know from elsewhere about the candidate. </p>
<p>And attributes the teacher totally agrees with are not lies, regardless of whom wrote the sentences. Personal does not mean personally typed; it means the letter represents the personal views of the recommender. </p>
<p>I know many execs who have not typed or written a letter in decades. What they do is a dictation outline of bullet points and the personal assistant writes the letter, and the exec reads, modifies and approves. Then the assistant, who has power of attorney, prepares the hardcopy and signs the final version and sends it out. Are all those letters dishonest and a lie, even though very few words, if any, were ever typed and written by the exec? Of course not. And the letters and contents therein are also legally binding, therefore, if a letter represents the truth, a dog could write it for all I care. </p>
<p>Almost every international grad student I’ve ever known wrote at least one of his or her LORs because their professors were too busy or didn’t feel comfortable writing in English. It truly isn’t that big a deal. The instructors who do this have every opportunity to read, and reject, the LORs before signing.</p>
<p>Yes, many people have letters written for them and they sign them, that is standard business practice, but they are not pretending to be neutral parties touting the worthiness of their own business. To write your own recommendation letter and have someone else put their name on it as their own is akin to calling a character witness at your trial, but having the character witness say “I’m too busy to go to court, and you know what I’d say about you, so why don’t you put on a disguise, pretend to be me, and testify for me about you.” The jury thinks they are hearing from an uninvolved party, not someone pretending to be an uninvolved party and deliberating hiding the fact that they are in fact, the person about whose character is being testified to.</p>
<p>A newspaper running an advertisement as if it were editorial copy - the dreaded unmarked advertorial is the same thing. Why not just print the press release verbatim, but attach a reporter’s byline to it? The public doesn’t have to know, right? But they think the newspaper is a neutral party</p>
<p>Colleges expect rec letters to be truthful statements written from a neutral or at least third party point of view about an applicant - to deceive them about the origination of the recommendation is very questionable from an ethical point of view. Quite frankly, if I were Princeton, I’d think about rescinding her degree.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 has it. Yes, I would too think about rescinding her degree.</p>
<p>You give the teacher as much information as you can, to help them write the letter. You can even phrase it as closely as possible.</p>
<p>But the mere act of YOU typing up that letter, and THEM signing off on it as theirs is just as much their ethical problem as it is theirs.</p>
<p>I’m wondering about the veracity of the book however. One comment is “full tuition scholarship at Princeton”. Really? Yes, they are need-blind for internationals, but how poor can the author be to “put the scam on” Princeton and write a book about it? It would be interesting for the Princeton folks to check out the story.</p>
<p>Another thing - I got in trouble once as a grad student because I warned a fellow student to be careful of plagiarism. Turns out the student freaked out, and got really upset, like I was shaming her or something. I was trying to prevent her from breaking the university’s Honor Code. And <em>I</em> got in trouble. There seems to be a cultural difference as to what is “cheating” and what is “appropriate” (“being strong” as the book site notes).</p>
<p>Not a big deal if truthful. </p>
<p>@MrMom62 " If I were an adcom, I’d start to question everything about that school, including whether its grades had any meaning as well."</p>
<p>Funny you mentioned the grade. At page257 she says that becuase her grade is 80+, the school acutally wrote a special note for her to colleges saying that 80+ equals a 4.0.
So she has a 4.0 GPA on her transcript.</p>
<p>Isn’t 90+ = 4.0? Not 80+?</p>
<p>@rhandco I find it funny that the book title is “being strong” too.
“Cheating” is not “being strong”.</p>
<p>Point of view matters I guess. There are people who lie, beg, borrow, and steal “for their families”. I know someone who lied about going to Princeton (coincidentally enough) as an undergrad, and once his company found out, he was fired for lying on his job application. There was a huge scandal, and his boss left the country for two years to wait for it to die down. He got a new job pretty quickly, because human resources would not disclose why he was fired. He’s doing great now, working at the NIH. I wonder if they know about why he was dismissed, doubt it considering ethics at the NIH is a major concern.</p>
<p>The end justifies the means for these people. Yet you have situations like the Dallas Ebola victim whose “crime” was to help a dying pregnant woman and the US hospital staff acting irresponsibly was a more important factor in how many people were exposed. The ones who were educated and trained to know what they were dealing with were the main problem, not him.</p>
<p>
You do know that a fair amount of what newspapers run, especially at smaller papers, are just reworded press releases, right?</p>
<p>See <a href=“http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/180013/fired-kc-star-reporter-sues-says-using-press-releases-isnt-plagiarism/”>http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/180013/fired-kc-star-reporter-sues-says-using-press-releases-isnt-plagiarism/</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It is interesting to me that people are pretending that the signer does not see, read, approve, possibly edit, and fully back the letter. </p>
<p>It is like manual labor means more than the words in the letter. Basically, the logic is if the person who signs the letter is not the person who spent the time on it, then content is not true. Which is just silly because the recommender is really only a verifier of an applicant. </p>
<p>One does not need to be the manual typer to intellectually read, and agree that a letter, any letter, accurately represents an applicant. Who performs the manual labor of typing is irrelevant to the accuracy of the words on the page.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Try telling that to a private school and the top magnet public schools. No teacher at these top schools see themselves as neutral re students. These schools are trying to “sell” students to top colleges much more than people understand. </p>
<p>Board meetings at my high school would surprise you - it was all the business of student into the top colleges. And yes, for most top schools that is their business, and if you think teachers are neutral to that effort, dream on. </p>
<p>Frankly, with all these high school kids asking for LORs, and teachers having limited time, it doesn’t surprise me at all. </p>
<p>I was recently reading where one college often has 400+ students applying to med school and I was imagining the Bio & Chem profs that were repeatedly getting hit up for LORs. I bet they either ask the students to pre-write them, or the prof has a boilerplate he/she uses and adds in a couple of lines from a letter/resume from the student. </p>
<p>By waiving your FERPA right, you are agreeing that you have never actual read or looked at your letter of recommendations.</p>
<p>While some teachers may be pressed for time, it’s incredibly dishonest in my opinion for a teacher let a student break this agreement. Teachers should have some level of responsibility in making sure that students do the right thing and are honest in the college application process, and by doing this they’re just encouraging students doing things merely to get into a good college, not because they actually want to do it.</p>
<p>
You are sadly mistaken about FERPA. Here is what waiving your right really means:
Waiving</a> FERPA is all about actions you might take after letters are sent, with getting the college to show them to you. Has absolutely nothing to do with a recommender deciding to allow you to see (or write) the letter. Sorry.</p>
<p>I thought students weren’t supposed to even SEE the letters of recommendation or colleges would discount the contents. If some students are allowed to write their own, all students should have the same opportunity. Or, at the very least, be able to read what was written about them.</p>
<p>@mikemac - I guess you’re correct on a technicality. Yet, this doesn’t change the fact that this person clearly read the letter before she enrolled in a college/university. I understand that I wasn’t correct about “never” being able to read it, but that is at most a nice way of saying that they expect you not to read your letters. Having knowledge of what the teacher wrote before you enroll is still violating the terms of the agreement.</p>
<p>I don’t really understand how you read that as saying that you can read it after the letters are sent. It clearly says that you can only read it after you enroll, not just after you submit your application. In my opinion it doesn’t change the validity of what I said – it merely tries to circumvent it by twisting around the phrasing of the agreement.</p>
<p>Wow, here’s a radical thought: why don’t we just do like the rest of the world and admit on standardized test scores…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No. The waiver only means the colleges to which one is applying cannot release the letters to the students, and only the students. However, a college could release the letter to a third party if it wanted to for some reason.</p>
<p>I went to top elite undergrad and grad schools, and everyone in my class saw his or her rec letters to grad schools even though we waived our rights on the grad school applications, as that waiver did not apply to the college or school writing the rec. I guess those top schools do not have clue what it is doing there. And I know they still do allow students to see the letters.</p>
<p>In fact, there is no recommendation letter that any professor or person has ever written for me that I have not seen. And for the record, I did not outline or write any of those (not that it matters), but I saw all of them. </p>
<p>I am just loving the fact of this pedestrian approach. i.e, a letter could be 100% accurate and true and all parities agree that is is correct, but if a specific person did not write it, then it is a lie. I find that intellectually interesting, as truth is now reduced to an act, not to the substance or content. That is new definition to me of truth and of accuracy as well.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I should have added that this applies only PRIOR to enrollment. It does not apply after admission because the school can still rescind. However, after enrollment, a student or parent of a student under 18 can see the entire file. </p>
<p>
If by “technicality” you mean looking at what the FAFSA rule actually says instead of making up my own rule, then yes.
Sorry, but all of this is an invention of yours.
I am really puzzled why you can’t understand this. Really, its not complicated. An FAFSA waiver is a waiver of the right of the student to demand to see the recs. It has nothing to do with the right of the author to show it to whomever they please. </p>
<p>I’ll try again, but I doubt this is going to make it any clearer to you. An FAFSA waiver is intended to address the situation of an applicant demanding to read their letters of rec without the consent of the author(s). Period. </p>
<p>FAFSA gives you the right to see educational records that pertain to you, and since those records include letters of rec submitted about you, FAFSA grants you the right to see the letters whether the author(s) want you to or not. Colleges understand that an author may not be willing to speak their mind freely if they know that the student they are writing about will later see the rec. </p>
<p>Therefore colleges offer students the chance to waive their FAFSA rights with regards to rec letters. Quoting from the Common App FAQ “Waiving your right lets colleges know that you will never try to read your recommendations. That in turn reassures colleges that your recommenders have provided support that is candid and truthful.”</p>
<p>I don’t know why you insist on thinking this has something at all to do with the author of a letter voluntarily showing it to the applicant. There is nothing in the FAFSA waiver that requires the applicant never see the rec. That is simply your invention, as is all your talk of “violating the terms”. </p>
<p>The only party bound by the FAFSA waiver is the applicant, who after signing can not force the college to reveal the rec letters – a right they had before signing the waiver (hence the use of the word "waiver). The author, on the other hand, is free to reveal the contents to the student if she wishes at any time; before it is submitted, after it is submitted, when they graduate college, whenever. </p>