<p>my son (currently junior) has about 12 colleges on his list that he wants to apply to. as he wants to apply for chemistry major his letters of rec will be from science teachers. some of his colleges use the common app but about 5 dont. also he will be applying for honors programs, scholarships etc which also require letters of recommendation and specific forms. he plans to get his apps out of the way by october so hopefully will be ahead of the bulk of requests by students. BUT as a rough estimate it could be about 20 letters each from what i have checked. Is it reasonable to request a teacher do 20 letters?? It is a small school and the students know their teachers really well and hopefully alot of the letters could be cut and pasted but that also means small faculty and limited ability to spread this burden.</p>
<p>If your son were to ask 6 different teachers instead of 3, to write recs for 12 colleges, he would actually impose a greater burden on the teachers, who presumably also have to write recs for other students, because 6 rather than 3 would have to come up with original text. It’s easier to write one generic rec and add a few specific lines for different applications than come up with wholly new recs.</p>
<p>Look carefully at what the colleges ask for in terms of letters of recommendation.</p>
<p>Some want only one letter of recommendation. Some want two. Some want two but prefer (or require) that the two be from different academic fields (i.e., an English teacher and a science teacher, not two science teachers). A few specify that one must be math or science and the other must be English or social studies – which eliminates the possibility of using a foreign language teacher’s recommendation for that college, even though a foreign language teacher’s recommendation is perfectly acceptable for other colleges.</p>
<p>So your son may find it necessary to ask three or four teachers for letters of recommendation, even if he is trying to limit his requests.</p>
<p>thank you both, i had noticed (especially with the merit scholarships he is applying for… that they also wanted ie english or foreign language or even a personal reference) the heaviest burden will fall on the science teachers though.<br>
i feel sorry for teachers and gc… i know it is part of their jobs but it really is alot of work.</p>
<p>Because it is such a lot of work and because teachers want to write individualized recommendations for each of the students whom they agree to recommend, some teachers limit the number of students for whom they will write recommendation letters each year. In my experience, they don’t limit the number of recommendations they will write for any individual student; what they limit is the total number of students whom they say “yes” to. </p>
<p>At my daughter’s high school, some teachers were willing to write recommendations for a hundred students or more, while others, who had less free time, limited themselves to no more than a dozen. </p>
<p>If your son knows which teachers he wants recommendations from, it would not be unreasonable for him to ask them at the end of this school year whether they would be willing to do so. If he doesn’t do it then, he should at least do it in the first few weeks of school in the fall (though probably not during the very first week, when teachers are extremely busy for other reasons). The idea is to get to the teachers he wants before they meet their “quotas.” </p>
<p>Another reason for making requests for recommendations early is that the teachers may want materials from your son that take time to assemble, such as a resume or brag sheet that discusses aspects of his academic and extracurricular activities that the teacher might not otherwise know about, samples of the work that he completed in that teacher’s class, and stamped, addressed envelopes to accompany each recommendation letter or form (sometimes, with the deadline for submission written on the inside of the envelope flap). Some teachers may also want the student to submit ALL of the paperwork for ALL of the recommendations at one time (which sometimes forces students who are applying to one college Early Decision to finalize their entire college application list as early as September), and they may want to receive everything a significant amount of time before the first deadline (perhaps a month).</p>
<p>This brings up an important point about deadlines. Every college and scholarship that your son applies to will have a deadline, but those aren’t the deadlines that matter. The deadlines that matter are the ones set by the high school – and by the individuals who write recommendations for him – and those may be as much as six weeks EARLIER than the college or scholarship’s deadline. (Usually, it’s only a month, but during the heaviest paperwork period – which also includes the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday breaks – it may be as long as six weeks.) Unless your son goes to an extremely accommodating high school, he can’t decide on December 15 to apply to a college or scholarship with a January 1 deadline because it’s too late to get a transcript and recommendations sent in time for the deadline.</p>
<p>great info marian. we are pretty sure the science teachers will be willing to do his recommendations (they already did some for his internship this summer…and he was accepted so assuming they were good) We will review some of the others and give him a heads up for other teachers…school is over the end of this month so he could ask them if willing now. we were thinking of “moving” the deadlines a bit … one of his teachers sent recommendation at the very last minute for the summer ones, so may suggest deadlines are a bit earlier than they actually are? ie one deadline is september 22 but may say its 15th?</p>
<p>The teachers might be willing to write now, though school will be over soon. Your son’s performance in their class will still be fresh in their mind. They can send the letter over to the GC to put into your son’s college application file (it’s usually better to send everything in the same packet). If the letter needs to be tweaked, they can add a paragraph or two later.</p>
<p>Sometimes, the “letter of recommendation” is actually a form that the teacher has to fill out (although in most cases, it is acceptable if the teacher simply fills out the top of the form and encloses the letter on a separate piece of paper).</p>
<p>So if you’re going to fudge the deadlines, make sure that the forms that you have to give the teacher don’t have the real deadline on them anywhere!</p>
<p>good suggestion marite. marian- Hadnt thought that forms might have actual deadlines on them LOL… that would be a big oops!</p>
<p>The deadlines the colleges give you already have a bit of a fudge factor. It takes weeks for them to even open all the mail they get. Recommendations go missing all the time. When our older son applied one of the recommendations was missing for one of the teachers at one school. Since that was the only one missing I suspect it got misfiled or lost in the mail. It was no biggie, they just asked the teacher to fax the recommendation to them.</p>
<p>good to know mathmom. i just found the 2010 common app online (thought it wasnt out until July) so hopefully we will be ahead of deadlines</p>
<p>parent56, where did you find the 2010 common app? I downloaded the one on the Common App website (it is annoying that it doesn’t state the year anywhere on the website!) and it still is the 2008-2009 version.</p>
<p>missourigal found it in last post of the following thread.surprised me, but it definitely prints out as fall 2010
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/common-application/558113-common-application-teacher-recommendations.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/common-application/558113-common-application-teacher-recommendations.html</a></p>
<p>I sent 6. I got into NYU so it must not have set me back. And there’s no way my test scores OR GPA would have gotten me in.</p>