<p>I know a lot of guidance counselors write generic letters for their students (I have heard that some simply change the names of one letter they wrote for each student), but I attend a fairly small school, and my counselor actually wrote me an amazing recommendation. He also talked about some medical issues I faced and how I overcame them, which I was not comfortable writing about myself. And I feel like that could help me with admissions.</p>
<p>So anyways, do colleges read your guidance counselor's recommendations? Or do they just skip over them? I feel like they have so much crap they have to read already for each applicant.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Yes, they read them. They also know that in some schools, owing either to the size of the school or to the number of students who are really in crisis, counselors don’t get to know their college-intending students as well as they’d like to.</p>
<p>When they read a fairly uninformative letter from such a counselor–filled with second-hand information learned from teachers, or simply not filled at all–they take it for what it is, but they don’t penalize the student for it. But even then, they’ll read it. When they see a counselor letter like the one you’re describing , they certainly do pay attention to it.</p>
<p>Check out this post from the blog of the MIT Admissions office: [Writing</a> Recommendations | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs]Writing”>How to write good letters of recommendation | MIT Admissions).</p>