hi, i’m a homeschooled student. i’m applying to colleges this year. I heard many times that ivy and other most selective colleges’ admission officers spend around 12 minutes on reading the application of one candidate.
my teachers recommendations have a length as follows:
first recommendation: 1100 words
2nd recommendation: 1000 words
3rd recommendation (work) 650words
Councillor recommendation: 1800 words (it’s pretty long)
what i want to know is that would it affect my application in a negative way if the recommendations are too long (plus, there would be my college essay)? should I ask my recommenders to make them short? what would be better?
I think 95% of students do not see their recommendations and never know how long they are. Honestly, colleges kind of prefer that – if you are reading the recommendation, who knows how honest the recommender is really being? I would not ask for changes.
Actually i haven’t seen my recommendations. I just asked my recommenders to tell me the approx word length so that i may get an idea about how long my recommendations are.
I would guess that most recommendations are less than a page long. I think a good recommendation probably would be 250-500 words. I’ve only seen two recommendations my kids got. One was when the GC asked for teacher recommendations - my son used his orchestra teacher knowing he wouldn’t use him for the real recommendations, but it would give the GC something to talk about. (My son had been in two orchestras every year and was concert master freshman year - well that recommendation was about three sentences long! We knew as nice as the man was, he wasn’t someone my kid should ever ask for a real recommendation.) Older son had a recommendation from a university prof he’d done a computer programming project for. That letter was about a page and a half. It described what my son had done and how easy he was to work with and how speedily he did the project. Lots of specifics.