Faulty assumption: there is an advantage to a HS writing her own letter. In my experience, students write lousy letters of recommendation because they do not have experience with the genre and dont have to vocabulary to brag in subtle ways. I’ve never seen one that I could sign without significant work, though less work than starting from scratch.
Faulty assumption: one can spin off meaningful, helpful letters without spending time describing the student’s specific abilities. Really a good letter of recommendation is full of claim AND evidence. Saying "she is exceptionally . . . " works much better if one can write “she has a column in the local paper” or “exhausted the school’s offering in math and science” or “developed an innovative approach to the after school program.” I’m writing a letter in support of a graduate school application tomorrow. I will respond to the draft of the student’s personal statement. Over 1/2 of students don’ t get the format and purpose and need advice. After I have sent her back comments on it, then I will write the letter, going back over the student’s writing for the course and discuss it in the letter. I will incorporate any specifics that support the personal statement. I know this process will take me about an hour even though it’s a straightforward letter. Yes, I could do less more quickly, but I want to support the student’s application.
Hey Marv – your posted advice above seems to be focused on rec letters for grad school and PHD programs. This is a kid applying to college undergrad. Pretty yuge difference between the volume and specificity of rec letters in those two contexts.
And most of the comments to that advice disagree with your position fyi. Here’s what one of the college prof commenters asks of his recommendees. The difference between this and asking for a first draft is minimal:
"I can write a better reference if you send me a current copy of your resume and tell me a little bit about why you’re particularly qualified for the job, educational program, or award you’re applying for. I don’t require those things for a recommendation, but it is probably worth your trouble to send them along. (You have to get this stuff together for your application anyway; you may as well get the maximum mileage out of it!)
If you have items you’d like me to mention in the recommendation, tell me what they are; email is fine. (However, I don’t promise to mention all of them; I have to have some personal knowledge of them to write about them.)
If you’re applying to a school, a copy of your application essay will help me write a better recommendation."
I’ve explained that difference many times. You may not care about it, but it is a difference: one is writing, one is editing (presumably, although, like I’ve said, I have my doubts that a teacher who would take the shortcut of asking a student to draft the letter would somehow resist the shortcut of submitting that letter without a major rewrite.)
Teachers are asked by colleges to write letters of recommendation, not to revise them.
I wrote every letter from scratch, and I’m neither nuts nor did I have too much time on my hands. Instead, I was being both ethical and responsible, and, maybe more importantly, I was happy to recommend my students and I had things to say about them that I wanted colleges to know.
Again: what message does it send to a student when a teacher abdicates her letter-writing responsibility and allows a student to recommend herself? What ethical message are you sending to that student?
Oh, and how about that little issue in the common app where the students have to declare that they haven’t seen their rec letter?
Taxonomize it however you want, but it’s part of a teacher’s job, and outsourcing it to the student is an abdication of responsibility and ethics. Lazy or shady or both.
@marvin100, you’ve made it crystal clear what you think of an instructor who solicits a draft recommendation letter from a student. (Lazy and shady–yup we got it.) And you’ve suggested that any student acquiescing to that kind of request becomes an accessory to unethical behavior.
So how to you advise OP’s daughter, or any other student in that position, to proceed? Should she refuse the request for a draft, thereby likely sacrificing the recommendation altogether or, at best, having it written by a disgruntled instructor (as if anyone would take that risk)? What if, as in the case of my D, the instructor is the most appropriate one to provide a grad school recommendation, and foregoing it would seriously impact her chances at admission? Or should the student mount an even higher horse and report the instructor’s behavior to the department as a violation of some theoretical ethical standard?
OP came here looking for help:
An exhaustive discussion of whether the professor in question should have requested the draft in the first place is of no value to the OP. It’s actually a shame to see someone come to CC for help and have to watch as a thread devolves into a useless debate the way this one has. Maybe some CC’ers out there–perhaps some of those posters who write recommendation letters regularly–can offer OP some solid ideas?
Good question, @MommaJ - I’d advise her to submit a brag sheet, and if asked, say she isn’t familiar with rec letter protocol and/or misunderstood the professor’s request. If the professor isn’t shady or laz ( ) he or she will gladly accept that and write a great letter.
Frankly, I’m not a fan of brag sheets and cannot help but think they promote lazy rec letter-writing and tempt teachers to attest to who the student claims to be, not who the teacher has seen him to be. And if that is the case, what is the point? The college already has information on the student’s perspective on himself through the rest of the application. Shouldn’t the teacher or professor be testifying to what he PERSONALLY has witnessed from the applicant, bringing to bear perhaps years of experience dealing with many other students? Don’t colleges want an objective adult’s assessment of the student’s character and abilities? How does it help the college if a teacher just repeats “Johnny is President of the Key Club and it seems he did a wonderful job…” What would be more helpful is for the teacher to say, “As the Key Club advisor, I observed Johnny in action and can say…”
That said, though, this is the way things are done now. Many high school teachers are lazy and are looking for a short cut. (Some are overworked I’m sure, but not many in our district. They are given prep periods and classes are done for the day at 2:30 PM. My heart bleeds that they might have to work until 3:30 PM to help a student.) However, this is a college professor we’re talking about–presumably a smart man with a PhD and far fewer rec letters to write. Inexcusable. Yet, this is the system and the student needs the letter. I’d give him a list of her accomplishments in the class and in the field, but would not write sentences. Neither a student nor his parents are likely to sound like a college prof., unless of course the parent IS a prof.
First, a college professor has a very different relationship with students than HS teachers. I only have about 50-70 students a semester, but many faculty in other disciplines have 300. We only see our students 3 hours/week for 15 weeks, though some do come by office hours. HS teachers see students 5 days a week for 36 or 37 weeks, and the teacher and student spend all those 5 days in the same building together. HS teachers should know their students in more complex ways than a professor. When I write letters for college students, I review the syllabus, their written assignments, their small group activities, progress in the course, etc. With the occasional exception, I can only write about their academic work narrowly defined.
Second, letters of recommendation have always been a joke, though it is getting much worse. If a recommender does not rave, then it isn’t worth writing the letter at all. I write this as someone who has read hundreds if not thousands of reconmmendations and reviews of the work for UG, GS, and faculty. Anything that seems faint praise condemns the candidate. I wish it wasn’t so, but from Lake Woebegone, all my students are above average, even brilliant (and I bet that gets the righteous going).
^^
I agree completely with your assessment of where we are right now with LOR’s. I am not saying that is the way it should be in an ideal world, but that’s where we are. At least in my recent experience with 2 high school students.
I just finished the app process with my youngest and went through it 2 years ago with my eldest. Both attended private high schools where they had strong relationships with their teachers. Even in those ideal circumstances the amount of input requested from parents and students by their counselors to assist in the writing of the letters was extraordinary. I attribute this to the general hyper-competitiveness of admissions, the current trend of the student’s app having to “tell a story” and for the privates the reality that admissions results affect their reputation.
While the “optics” look bad, I wish I had been presented with the option of simply submitting a draft letter for them to work with as a starting point-- it would have been much simpler. We spent hours upon hours filling out questionnaires answering questions related to their early childhood and middle school years, submitting lists of every award, athletic accomplishment and service activity we could think of and recalling anecdotes/stories that might support positive personality traits. The students submit as much info if not more. They really do not want to miss a thing. Now of course the academic commentary comes completely from the teachers.
Now as their mother I certainly have a very good grasp of the “story” they are trying to tell in their app. I am very pragmatic and would have much preferred to submit my input in the format of a letter highlighting those things that would have the most impact, and let them pick and choose what they want to use. But instead they are sorting through reams of paper looking for highlights that most students/parents could present to them in a nutshell.
I have no inkling of how much if anything that we submitted found its way into the final letters as both of mine signed their waivers. If this is the scenario for high school students that are well known by their teachers, I cannot imagine what it is like for those who do not have those relationships.
To state the obvious, the current system confers yet another advantage on students with well-educated parents who can fill out a stellar brag sheet for their student. I could see some parents writing things like, “Johnny is a good boy who stays out of trouble.”
The students submit their own individual brag sheets as well.
I really don’t find that socio-economic status defines a parents ability to highlight their children’s accomplishments. In fact the trope you often hear about how uninvolved some educated wealthy parents are with their own children would argue against that thought.
As a practical matter, most high schools have had to build a fairly extensive rec letter producing machine. Since every senior needs one or two teacher rec letters, and often a counselor rec letter as well. Plus extra rec letters for some college specific requirements. Plus even more letters to apply for various scholarships, internships, programs and jobs.
At my kid’s HS, that system involves the submission of a student resume, plus a parent generated brag sheet. Plus an extensive assigning/matching process so that the rec letter writing burden is spread out evenly among all the various teachers. A kid can’t just ask their favorite teacher to do a letter. All of this then has to be tracked online in order to make sure that hundreds of letters get to hundreds of destinations in compliance with hundreds of deadlines. All in all, it is a fairly industrialized, high volume, sausage making process.
The teachers and counselors at my kid’s HS are highly experienced rec letter producing bots. They don’t ask for first drafts because they don’t need them. They have previous hundreds of prior precedent rec letters that they use and reuse and reuse. Male soccer player who wants to study STEM at Harvard? They have a form for that. Female theater kid for UCLA and psychology? They have that form too.
Marv’s views reflect an ideal, low volume context that probably applies where a small number of college kids are getting a small number of rec letters (perhaps for grad school program applications). At the HS level, such a quaint system would never meet the volume and time demands.
Like others our GCs asked the parent’s for brag sheets, talked to the kids and also got two teacher recommendations junior year that were not necessarily the same as the ones writing the official recommendations senior year. I don’t know how much they used from the brag sheet, but I think it helped them put the kid in context. I mentioned for my younger son that he dropped his 504 plan coming into high school, but that the lack of using extra time probably affected a few of his grades for the worse. Most teachers didn’t ask for extra info. The exception was the APUSH teacher, a lot of his questions were about what you did or did not like about his class. What your probable major was, why you’d chosen the colleges you had. He also asked for a photocopy of one of the papers you wrote in his class. It was pretty clear he wanted to be able to say specific things about how you tackled his class and how it fit in context of you as an applicant.
OP here. Was out of town. My, who would have thought this would touch so many nerves?
I don’t believe the professor is lazy in general, though he might not be experienced in this area. He assigned a book/paper for the class that wasn’t specifically about comp sci (creating extra work for himself), and required all students to come to office hours at least once so he could get to know each one at least a little bit. To me, that doesn’t seem like a disinterested or lazy teacher. His response did indicate that this is how he typically creates recommendation letters, not that it was because of the type requested. I’m wondering if perhaps he gets requests for a variety of types of recommendations, because the university serves a wide variety of students, and he wants to highlight what is most helpful for each situation, be it a job application or an academic program. But maybe I’m projecting.
This was not one of the initially required letters of recommendation. Contacted school about separate issue and admissions counselor immediately picked up on the aspect of the high school counselor rec, which he thought might not be very informative. (D does meet weekly with high school counselor as a requirement for taking all the off campus courses, so the counselor probably knows her better than most of the students in the school, though for a short time.) D found out about letter suggestion during finals week and waited until final exams and holidays were done out of respect for professor’s time and personal life. She did offer to meet with him to discuss her goals, etc. She recognized he might not have time to write letter and addressed that in initial request.
Aside from any ethical issues, about which there has been debate, on a practical level D doesn’t think a letter she drafts would add any new insight about her to the admissions committee. How can a high school senior realistically assess her strengths in context of a diverse university setting?
She contacted admissions office for advice; they agreed a letter composed by her wouldn’t shed additional light. She contacted professor to say thanks, but what he proposes won’t be needed, and that she is looking forward to this semester’s course with him.
) he or she will gladly accept that and write a great letter.