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Lol because EVERYONE who posts a thread about “a friend” is CLEARLY talking about THEMSELVES! :rolleyes:</p>
<p>No, I have not. He is, however, my boyfriend. I’ve known him for three years. Does this clear anything up?</p>
<p>Oh, and for the record, I got a “Top 1%” overall from this teacher. (Well, it was really close to the line between “Top 5%” and “Top 1%,” but that’s another story for another thread…)</p>
<p>ADad- this is a student who wants to be a physician. Your words describe what I always hope for in a doctor who is treating me. </p>
<p>Poseur- Tell your friend to not send in this recommendation. But who knows what are in the others. Also, he needs to get a hold of himself. If he is offered any interviews to the med programs he will need to exude just what ADad states above.</p>
<p>Best of luck to him.</p>
<p>Thank you for being more polite in this post, oreo45.</p>
<p>FYI: Upon reading this thread, he acknowledged that he had overreacted (and that he felt “dumb” for having done so) and even cited your (first) post, tempered with a “lol.” :] I think that he feels much better about the situation, now.</p>
<p>Best of luck to you, as well, in your endeavors.</p>
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<p>Fine, if that is how you see it. I just don’t think a time of unprecedented stress is indicative of a person as a whole, including leadership, but okay.</p>
<p>I write such recommendations as a professor (for former students going into graduate programs). On the face of it, it seems absurd to question her self-reported opinion of your friend. You may not agree with her opinion about his talents, that is understandable. But to suggest she somehow wrote her true opinion wrong doesn’t make sense: it is as if you and the friend know her opinion of your friend better than she knows her opinion of your friend.</p>
<p>Check boxes mean little. What matters is the letter. She is comparing this friend to all the other students she writes recommendations for and you perhaps can not appreciate her frame of reference. Moreover, when a recommendation has all the top scores through every category, it is likely to get discounted: it gives the impression the person filling it out didn’t really think about it very much and its a biased report. Thus the odd carefully considered “top 20%” make the “top 5%” look more legitimate. </p>
<p>I hope your friend isn’t actually this concerned and wasting energy on something so minor. It conveys a lack of maturity and much needed perspective (which may be very age appropriate for a teenager, but might discount someone from consideration as a leader or for participation in something like a competitive medical program).</p>
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<p>I think nocousin was being facetious. (And I think he was referring to suing the teacher for a bad rec.) In any event, it’s not illegal. Teachers can show the letter to the student with no penalty.</p>
<p>Poseur: This doesn’t answer your question, but here is some gratuitous relationship advice: He is your boyfriend and so you probably think highly of him. Maybe you (and he) have an implicit understanding that he is “better” than you, and you (and he) are disappointed that the teacher gives a higher numerical value to you than to him on a box.</p>
<p>My advice to you (both) is to not let other people’s opinion of you influence how you think of each other. People don’t know you like you know each other.</p>
<p>Good luck to both of you.</p>
<p>Teacher recs talk about what happens in the teacher’s class. ECs should play no role in these, except to emphasize some other point the teacher is already making. You’ve already got your lists of ECs and volunteer service and stuff, the teacher rec is just to see how the student is in a learning environment.</p>
<p>Geeze louise. Looks like we have a lone wolf in the making. This is part of the reason health care in this country is facing a serious shortage of labor–institutions that provide education in medical fields have perpetuated this idea that physicians must be perfect perfect perfect. You know what it takes to get to medical school? Four years of joy-less, socially suffocated education, another four years of constant academic barrage, and still more years of sleep-deprived work-obsession before finally being able to enter the happy land of insurance claims and malpractice suits.</p>
<p>Now, I’m all for top-of-the-line medical care, but what does this system gets us? A lot of book-smart physicians who don’t know how to relate to people or tell when enough is enough. Case in point: the OP’s boyfriend (as far as this single biased situation describes him). People think that in order to succeed as a health care provider, every little detail must be exactly as according to plan. “Only the top 10%? Oh no’s! All of my dreams will be shattered–I can’t just be better than /most/ people, I must be better than practically /everybody/, or no one will accept me. Must work work work to fix this.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, people in the health care industry are usually proud of their lone wolf status. They really shouldn’t be. Imagine what improvements could be made in national care if we could turn out nurses who actually care about people, and doctors who are psychologically stable enough (i.e. essentially happy with their professions and confident enough to appreciate others for their contributions, and don’t just view them as rungs on the ladder to prestige) to work well with others and relate to patients every once in a while. Or if people didn’t have to pay so much for medical school…all this was once a good way to weed out the chaffe and ensure that only the cream of the crop had scalpels placed in their hands. But now, with the aging of a significant portion of the population, as well as the popularization of higher education, it’s just a hindrance.</p>
<p>Now, I know Poseur has officially abandoned this thread, but I must point out something about the entire situation: the young man in question wishes to be a physician. Imagine the hospital his future self works for is conducting an evaluation of his performance, and he receives less than top marks. Will he want to do what his instinct is to do now–go to his superiors and tell them how unfair their evaluation was? Demand that they change it before sending the results to Medicaid for funding? That wouldn’t be very wise.</p>
<p>i mean, or you could assume that the teacher does know what she/he is saying, and maybe out of 40 kids she teaches, he is the 4th in terms of leadership, putting him in… 10%. Even if he is the absolute best student, if the teacher feels that 5% conveys the truth better, then it probably does. The point of the letter to what the teacher thinks of you, not what you think of yourself, so it is irrelevant here if you think you should have got 1%. Oh, and what is said in the written portion of the letter is so much more important than the check boxes.</p>
<p>Is it a problem that you got a higher mark than he did?</p>
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It isn’t illegal. Teachers can show their recs to the student if they wish, the waiver only pertains to the college.</p>
<p>Chevda is right. Plus, if you ask anyone for a recommendation you should be sure of what will happen without seeing it. You can always sign the waiver saying you want to see it, but frankly those are taken with a grain of salt by evaluation committees. Since a recommendation is someone’s opinion, there is nothing that you can do, since you asked for it, unless the individual put in unture information. Also, a recommendation is less about your record and more about you. Therefore, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Given the discription, I am not so sure it will matter that much.</p>
<p>So when students check the waiver box, are they are saying the universities cannot or just may not show them their letters? What if the universities want to? Is it an agreement between the letter-writer and the university that what they say will not be revealed? </p>
<p>One of my daughter’s recommenders wouldn’t write a letter unless she waived her right to see it. A couple of times she had to get copies of her letters for scholarships, etc., and the envelopes were always sealed, with writing over the place where the flap closes over the envelope body. I thought, “Boy,they really don’t want her to read what they wrote! I wonder what’s in there.” She never saw any of her letters. I still wonder…</p>
<p>He shouldn’t worry about it… there’s not much he can do now</p>
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Thank you. </p>
<p>You see, I didn’t include the part about my getting a “Top 1%” rating overall in the original post because I wasn’t sure if it were relevant, and because I thought that people might be too hasty to include that part of the story in their evaluations of the situation. You’re right, though, that this IS an important part of this situation, in our case.</p>
<p>What you say is accurate to an extent; however, neither of us is presumptuous enough to assign ourselves values (especially in comparison to one another) for such personality traits as those on the CommonApp form. The only exception – the only thing on which we can both agree – is that relative to one another, he deserves a higher rating in “Leadership,” based on the activities that I mentioned in the first post. I do have positions in two clubs in which I’ve been heavily involved, but this teacher doesn’t even KNOW this, as I gave her my resume in the very beginning of the year, before I was elected to the positions. Yet she gave me a 5% in that category and gave him that obviously-intentional 10%… and neither of us can understand that. Perhaps I demonstrate more leadership in the classroom, depending on how she defines the trait, but neither of us can imagine what this definition could be.</p>
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This seems a bit brash a generalization. I understand where you’re coming from, and I do see this stigma epitomized in some people based on my experience on this website and with those I know, but your words seem too strong to be accurate. I’m sure you’re aware that not EVERY pre-med student experiences “four years of joyless, socially suffocated education,” as no one would dare to assign such a description to such a vast amount of different human experiences, so I might just be picking on semantics here – but it bothers me that you speak in such absolutes.</p>
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If you read my most recent additions to the thread, you’d see that my boyfriend acknowledged that he had overreacted. Really, my goal in posting this thread was to get feedback like this – to get people to say, you know, “hahahaha wow, I can’t believe he’s upset about such great ratings; that’s ridiuclous!!!” because, as I’m biased, my telling him that he was overreacting didn’t do much. He does feel much better after reflecting upon the situation and after seeing what others have to say about his exceptional ratings. </p>
<p>I admit that you are fairly accurate when you describe his mindset as: “I can’t just be better than /most/ people, I must be better than practically /everybody/, or no one will accept me.” My boyfriend is INCREDIBLY driven, and although he is not very competitive or concerned with “better than…everybody,” he always strives to be THE BEST POSSIBLE (which, in this situation, would be the “Top 1%” categorization.) Again, though, this isn’t about being better than others; he’s not that type of person at all. He competes only with the 100% mark.</p>
<p>Here’s an example that further demonstrates where he’s coming from: GPAs in my high school are calculated such that an 89.5% (which rounds to an ‘A’) is equivalent to any other ‘A,’ like a 105%. Moreover, one doesn’t have to get an ‘A’ every quarter to get an ‘A’ for the year, which goes into the cumulative GPA as a 4.0. As a result of this system, 13 people have 4.0s, and the class rankings are based on weighted GPA. My boyfriend has gotten an ‘A’ (and I assure you, always much closer to the 105% end of the spectrum than the 89.5%) every quarter; however, because of the fact that he didn’t stock up on worthless APs for the sake of his GPA (instead taking Latin 1 through 4 as electives, which are unweighted), he is rank 8 in our class. He was INCREDIBLY frustrated when he found out about this, because he has easily gotten the highest actual AVERAGE in the grade, yet all of his hard work has amounted to a (still very good) rank 8. This is the same way he felt when he received this evaluation – as if all of his hard work had come out to something that was still, by his standards, subpar. If I just told you, “My boyfriend was upset when he found out that he was ranked 8th in our class,” I’m sure that your knee-jerk reaction would be similar to what you posted – but can’t you understand, upon my elaboration, that he has a RIGHT to be frustrated? Frustrated with the system that encourages a student to strive for the 89.5% and in which the only two students who have gotten straight A’s EVERY SINGLE QUARTER are ranked 8 and ~10? Sorry if this seems irrelevant to the thread; I’m just trying to explain why I think that his “X isn’t good enough” attitude is sometimes justified, IMO.</p>
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I am offended by this sweeping generalization about the medical industry, and I’m sure that your doctor would be, too. </p>
<p>…Do you REALLY think that doctors don’t care about their patients and just choose the profession for the prestige? You must have had some pretty horrible experiences, and I’m sorry. </p>
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Haha. Well, I’ll agree with you there. Neither of us really thought that approaching the teacher would be a good idea, but we wanted some objective input, which we’ve clearly gotten. </p>
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Very good point. But, well… this is where including the information about my getting a “Top 1%” from the teacher (and a “Top 5%” in “Leadership,” when I have not demonstrate nearly the initiative in taking leadership roles that he has) would have made the nature of my boyfriend’s frustration clearer… and further complicated the situation. :/</p>
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We just couldn’t understand why she rated me more highly than him in some traits, that’s all. Especially when she raves about him all the time, and she’s rarely expressed admiration for MY ability. </p>
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Hahaha, don’t worry – that’s normal protocol. All of my teachers do that, too. It just shows that the letters are legit.</p>
<p>Poseur- FYI the stats are not good for a successful marriage to a doctor until at least after the internship year is complete.</p>
<p>I’ll keep that in mind. :)</p>
<p>Poseur- I agree that it sucks for your boyfriend. But I agree with starbright, the checkboxes are not as important as the words in the letter. As for the class rank- would it be possible to get the counselor to explain the reason for the lower class rank in his letter?</p>
<p>I think that the counselors include an explanation as to why there are so many 4.0s and blah blah blah. Dunno about his situation in particular, though.</p>
<p>Will adcoms be smart enough to be like, “Hmm, unweighted 4.0 and weighted rank 8… oh it must be because other people took more weighted classes, but let’s look at his schedule… wow this IS rigorous… and the counselor checked off “most rigorous courseload”… so okay, he’s good”?</p>