<p>How important are they? I'm applying for canadian universities(utoronto, ubc, mcmaster, york, alberta)
The problem is that mine are not strong -_- just 1 page</p>
<p>1) you’re mistaken about that length of rec letter is correlated to quality. Most organizations only ask for 1 page.</p>
<p>2) the relative importance of rec letters is proportional to how selective/competitive the applicant pool of the university can be.</p>
<p>The higher the admissions rate, generally, the lower the importance of rec letters in the overall decision process.</p>
<p>Letters can be very important depending on the school, but length is not a good indicator of quality. As long as the people who wrote it had something interesting to say, it should be fine.</p>
<p>I know that at UBC, you don’t submit recs – you only provide contact information.</p>
<p>Unless you are a “mature” student, then you have to submit two recs like I did. I would imagine that the actual quality of the rec is far more important than length because you can drone on and on about a person and it still probably won’t tell you much.</p>
<p>It’s my understanding that they are of some weight but won’t save an application - maybe as important as SAT Subject Test scores or duration of extracurriculars, if they don’t say anything truly spectacular.</p>
<p>Generally, if you attend a large urban public school, schools will understand if the letters are somewhat generic or form-like. So, solid/eh letters won’t hurt you, but they won’t do anything for you either.</p>
<p>And I agree that a letter is not determined by length. One of the strongest letters I’ve gotten is one page (because it was required to be), but was full of concrete interactions I’d had with the recommender.</p>