Is there a way for a recommender to withdraw their letter of recommendation and correct it?

Applying to College
1

My daughter’s teacher did a wonderful letter of recommendation for her but it has some grammatical errors (due to duping) and a fact that is not correct. Is there a way for her to withdraw and correct the letter on the Common App? Our school connects to the Common App through Naviance so it may have to be done on the Naviance system. I realize that it can’t be withdrawn for the schools that have already received it but my daughter is doing a new batch of applications next week and we would like for the recommendation letter to be correct.

2

I don’t know the CA’s system of overwriting uploaded rec letters but for the upcoming schools, you don’t HAVE to submit the LOR via the Common App. You can simply have the LORs Xeroxed and mailed or faxed to the colleges – they’ll fully accept them. Even with the ones your daughter has already submitted, have the teacher write a cover letter explaining the errors and requesting that the new LOR supersede the previously uploaded one. Have the two docs faxed to the admissions offices.

3

Ask your D’s guidance counselor.

4

I am thinking unless the mistated fact is quite egregious, this is not a real problem. I can’t imagine the college is going to be concerned with a few grammatical errors. They probably get thousands of LORs that have errors. Think of all the non-language arts teachers who write them. They are interested in the content only.

If the fact is pretty wrong and misleading, I might ask the guidance counselor to follow up with an email to the admissions office and explain it briefly. If it’s something really minor (I loved the paperJimmy wrote about photosynthesis) then I think it isn’t worth pursuing. If innthe other hand the teacher said “Jimmy did a great job heading up the charity fundraiser,” when he didn’t, that is when I would try to address the issue.

5

Thanks! I’m still looking for a way for us to correct it in the future. I can’t imagine that she has to keep linking to the letter with the mistakes when the teacher will agree to correct it.

6

This is why I’m glad we didn’t see the teachers’ recs!!

7

Our D never saw any recs. She got into nine excellent colleges. I doubt it wil be an issue, barring a shocking error.

8

Please don’t ask your teacher that wrote a very supportive rec to resubmit it.