<p>I think that my rec letters might contain an error or two. For things like activities and awards, the final word still comes from the student's application, right? Even if a recommendation might contain errors?</p>
<p>Also, in a typical recommendation, the recommender will not just go and relist all the activities and the hours and weeks you do them, correct? I've been told that it should instead just comment on the type of person you are, and is more anecdotal than a summary of activities.</p>
<p>Ok, that’s good info. Let’s say if the teacher might have incorrect info, but my application is good, will that be a problem? There’s a chance they may have the years of participation wrong or weeks per year wrong. For example, if they say 40 weeks per year for something, but on my app I put 30something weeks, would that be a big deal? I doubt that the letters are just a rewording of the activities section, but in case they might have written a sentence or two on an activity, and it is different from my application, which has the right numbers, is that a biggie?</p>
<p>If there was a concern, the AO would call the teacher who wrote the rec letter or the GC. A trivial difference in hours would not be worth a phone call.</p>
<p>My husband has a friend who told him she got a look at her son’s Guidance Counselor letter and discovered that the GC had confused her second son with her oldest son, and given him credit for various activities and accomplishments that were his brother’s. The schools are going to wonder why Son #2 was so modest as to fail to mention his many achievements!</p>
<p>@DeskPotato–that is really interesting. I guess mistakes like that do happen. </p>
<p>When admissions people look for activities, don’t they go to the application itself? Like in DeskPotato’s example, if one son was given credit for the other’s achievements, just because the letter stated it, but it wasn’t listed on the application, the admissions officers wouldn’t just rely on what the letter said?</p>
<p>So in general, say a teacher falsely gives credit to an applicant doing something, but the applicant does not write it on his or her application. Would the admissions people just go with what the application says?</p>
<p>And you’re not going to get a better answer than that. Your guess is good as ours. Plus, it’s meaningless anyway. You’ll be rejected/accepted in spite of the . 4 seconds the reader noted that sentence in the document.</p>
<p>Getting a little obsessive here? Seriously, go relax. Avoid CC for a long time.</p>
<p>Yeah, I just don’t want to get credit for anything that I haven’t done…so if in case my recs have the wrong years or wrong number of weeks for an activity, that it won’t impact the final decision. But, someone once did tell me that if they want activities info, they will turn to the app instead of looking in rec letters, which shouldn’t even be just a list and summary of activities. That makes sense to me, just wanted to see if anyone else thought so too.</p>
<p>The letter writer shouldn’t even be writing about how many hours you put in unless it is highly relevant…it should speak more to your overall abilities to succeed in college and speak generally about your accomplishments. I doubt they used any solid numbers. I personally think that would just be too many unnecessary details.</p>
<p>A teacher writing false information about you can NEVER hurt you because of the false information.</p>
<p>The only way it could be bad is if the school sees that the teacher got a lot of things wrong, in which case they might think that you don’t know the teacher very well. In that case, they just won’t really consider the letter. This actually isn’t very bad since once again, a letter can NEVER hurt you.</p>
<p>What the colleges have from you, they have from you. You can’t change that at this point so it’s not something to worry about at all.</p>
<p>I see yeah it probably won’t hurt at all–I just want to make sure it won’t accidentally help me. </p>
<p>But, like NovaLynxx said, though, they probably would avoid using solid numbers anyway, since that would be pointless and just a restatement of the application.</p>