<p>I've been told that in past years, MIT has required recommenders to fax or mail their recommendations. However, on the recommendation site that I see, there's no such mention of that. There's a system to send a request for a recommendation to your recommender's email, similar to Common App. I haven't seen a blog post or a notice signifying that they're changing their system, but that's what it seems like. Does anyone know for sure which of the two it is?</p>
<p>MIT will accept a Fax quite happily (and a mail LoR slightly less happily), but as I understand it talking to the admissions office, the strong preference is for an online reference, if your recommenders are amenable to that. It dramatically reduces the risk of a reference being misfiled or mishandled in any other way, particularly if you have a common name. MIT does get LoR that say “I would like to recommend John Smith for MIT” without at any point identifying which John Smith, which school, which country. Ugh… Use the online reference if you can.</p>
<p>This is, indeed, the first year of the online recommendation system.</p>