<p>When a teacher fills the forms out they are comparing a student to those over their entire career. This can be at several schools over many years. Some years you will get no top 1% students.</p>
<p>I got all Top 1% except for 2, and I’m not sure what they were. I think it’s kind of arbitrary. I know the students he’s had over the last 5 years, and all of them were miles ahead of me. He’s had kids who had published novels, interned at the governor’s office, published in the LA Times, gone to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, all of them. And he taught James Fallows; the writer for The Atlantic. There’s no way I’m comparable to him. I doubt I’m top 1% of his students of all time. He also offered to call the schools I applied to and talk to them, comparing me to the people that he had written letters for and sent there. How helpful do you think that would be? 3 kids from my school have gone to Penn in the last 7 years or so, and I think he likes me more than all of them. He also wrote their letters of rec.</p>
<p>Let it go, a simple check in the other box won’t make or break your friends chances.</p>
<p>It would be inappropriate and unwise to ask the teacher to revise the rec. When teachers write recommendations, they put their word on the line to be judged and evaluated. That’s why it’s so important for them to be scrupulously honest. If they said everyone was top 1%, or raved about each and every student identically, then their word would be worthless.</p>
<p>I would consider it extremely rude to question the teacher’s recommendation. The reason to do so is incredibly minor, and after all, your friend asked the teacher to write the rec, not the other way around. I’d say thank you and move on.</p>
<p>I agree that it would be rude to question the recommendation, which represents the teacher’s opinion. It would be appropriate to talk to the teacher about it only if the recc had inaccuracies in it.</p>
<p>The narrative is far more important than are the check boxes. I’ve also heard that top colleges tend to take reccs more seriously when they don’t indicate that the student is across the board perfect. </p>
<p>What your friend needs to do is to send the teacher a thank-you note (preferably handwritten), something that it seems most students neglect doing after teachers do this kind of time-consuming favor for them.</p>
<p>Sounds like this student is an arrogant brat. The teacher is being honest. Not everyone’s going to love you. Thats OK. And true in the real world. This student is not respecting the teacher or the process. And he wants to be a doctor? Ugh.</p>
<p>Wow, that last comment is needlessly harsh and judgmental. </p>
<p>I think everyone has a stage in his (or her) life when he moves up to a different scale of comparison, and harsh reality sets in. The end of high school is definitely one of those stages. Your friend asked one of the best teachers at his school for a recommendation; he got a comparison against all the students this teacher has had, which could be twenty years of multiple classes. In many ways, it’s flattering that he is among the top 5% of what must be a highly talented group. You don’t see it that way because you don’t have the teacher’s breadth of experience. </p>
<p>To me, a kid who is “top 1%” is one who the teacher will remember all of his or her life. If your friend is quiet and modest about his achievements, he simply may not be as memorable as the others. A top 5% categorization is nothing to sneeze at. If he does approach the teacher, it should be along the lines of, “What would you suggest to improve my leadership qualities?” or “What is a polite way to let people know about my accomplishments?” He may be very surprised by the responses.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t confront the teacher. He/she already gave your friend very high marks, and in confronting the teacher, it would make your friend seem ungrateful, not to mention the awkward conversation. how do you know the teachers don’t give all their students top 5% or top 1%?</p>
<p>Wait so do some of your schools let you see the recommendations that the teachers wrote or no?</p>
<p>I have long advocated that teachers are not above the law and could be and SHOULD BE sued for transgressions in the classroom and in recommendations.</p>
<p>In fact, I think that lawsuits are the ONLY way sometimes to effectuate change and remove bad administrators and teachers, both in private and public schools.</p>
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Some teachers do show the letters to the student, even if the student has waived the right to demand to see them. Some do not.</p>
<p>But it is due to these very situations that most teachers prefer students to sign the waiver, and that most colleges give more credibility to letters if the students have signed the waiver.</p>
<p>The reality is, few people can be in the top 1% category – very few by definition. Top 5 or 10% is actually quite good and, really, questioning someone’s evaluation of him is not likely to get a good response.</p>
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<p>This remark may give a glimpse of why the teacher doesn’t see this student to be top 1% or top 5% material for leadership.</p>
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<p>It’s not a matter of liking or not liking.</p>
<p>^ Bad choice of words – I meant that I didn’t really know that she had such respect for me intellectually. We do clash occasionally in our views; maybe she admires that I’m willing to speak up and challenge her. </p>
<p>To all of the repliers of this thread that think that my friend is arrogant or immature, that’s really not the case at all. He’s just, like the rest of us, very stressed about the application process. It’s easy to overreact to something like this, especially when you are constantly second-guessing yourself and your ability. (And if I were applying to these med programs, I would probably freak out all the time, too! They have, like, 2% acceptance rates. Pretty intimidating…)</p>
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Is it illegal for teachers to choose to let students see their recs? 
I thought that the waiver pertained only to whether or not the UNIVERSITY could show the student the letter, and that the teacher could do whatever he or she pleased.</p>
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<p>Well, Poseur, that’s all quite understandable–but “overreacting” and “constantly second-guessing oneself” is not what one would expect from someone who is in the top 1% or top 5% of leadership.</p>
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<p>It would be completely unenforceable to forbid teachers from showing the students their recommendations, so I highly doubt there is any law prohibiting it.</p>
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<p>How is leadership ability related to a slight overreaction during a time of unprecedented stress? Not being argumentative, but I really don’t see the connection.</p>
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Fair enough. </p>
<p>Although maybe the 10% should have been in “Self-confidence,” instead. ;]</p>
<p>Poseur, it seems that you have quite an interest in the plight of your “friend.”
Have you known this individual “your entire life?”</p>
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<p>Calmness under stress, the ability to carry on well with confidence and thereby to inspire calmness, confidence, and performance in others, is imo one of the hallmarks of leadership.</p>