Professors telling you to write your own reccomendations. Ethical?

College Confidential Community
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<p>I've had a few friends who needed recs for study abroad, transferring, or other applications. Many of them have told me that they wrote their own recommendation at the professors urging. They just sent it to the professor to proofread and edit afterwards. </p>

<p>I strongly believe that it is unethical for the professor for suggesting this and for the student to accept. If a professor does not know a student well enough or does not feel he or she warrants a recommendation, he or she should simply refuse. I would NEVER accept an offer from a professor to write my own recommendation. If he or she does not feel I am worth the time and effort to write an honest rec, then I do not deserve it. </p>

<p>I can see it from the instructors perspective, they honestly want the student to succeed, but don't really know them well or don't have time to write a good rec.</p>

<p>I'm eager to hear your thoughts.</p>

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<p>I think students should not be able to write their own recommendations because students will tend to make themselves look better than they should just so they stand out and they won’t be honest. Professors will be honest and say what they really think of the student so that the institution will know exactly how well the student is doing academically.</p>

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<p>I disagree with you on just about every count.</p>

<p>First, professors are busy people. In between working with graduate students, holding lectures, teaching classes, and publishing and conducting their own research, there really isn’t very much time left for comparatively insignificant things as writing recommendations for students. </p>

<p>Second, not every professor is familiar with every context in which a recommendation would be required. As such, allowing the student to write a recommendation, or at least to provide insight into what information should be included for a specific rec, is more beneficial.</p>

<p>Third, if they accept to sign a recommendation for you, they have no doubts about your academic or personal qualifications. Letting you write your own rec shouldn’t be a blow to your ego, but rather an acknowledgement of your own personal integrity and a sign of the professor’s trust in you as a person. In university settings, it’s difficult and often impossible to get to know students well enough to write a proper recommendation.</p>

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<p>Interesting question. </p>

<p>If the professor takes the time to review and edit the recommendation with the student before signing it, then the professor essentially “owns” the recommendation and agrees with everything on it.</p>

<p>Short of asking the student to write the draft, some professors may ask the students to provide them brag sheets and/or give them directions to tailor the recommendations. I won’t be surprised if some profs do a lot of cut-and-paste from the brag sheets.</p>

<p>Some profs may write the initial draft and then give it to the student for comment before signing off the final version. </p>

<p>So we are really talking about the degree of student involvement in the writing of recommendation. At which point does it cross the ethical boundary?</p>

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<p>It crosses an ethical boundary when you refer to yourself in the third person as if you were the professor.</p>

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<p>Agree with cgarcia, when you refer to yourself in the third person, then it crosses the line. You are writing in your voice, which is probably distinct from the professors voice. Even if they approved it, edited it, in the end, it would still be written by YOU in your voice. Of course, you could try to make yourself sound like the professor, but still…</p>

<p>What would the admissions committee think when they realize the personal statement and the recommendation are written in the same voice? It would not be very hard to tell. I imagine it would count against you, though not disqualify you, as this does happen often. </p>

<p>@rockermcr</p>

<h1>1 Professors are busy, but not investment banker busy as you make it sound, if they feel you have been an exceptional student, they will not hesitate to write a recommendation that will take no more than an hour or two. Thankfully, my professors have always been willing to write recs for me, but I will admit (not humbly :)), I was an exceptional student.</h1>

<h1>2 They are Professors. They should be used to receiving requests for all types of recommendations. Besides, most recommendation forms and letter formats are fairly generic, it does not take a genius to figure it out. Besides, many professors are geniuses.</h1>

<h1>3</h1>

<p>Accepting to sign off on a rec for you means that you were probably a fairly good student grade wise that they didn’t know very well, but you were not exceptional. This is what I noticed about most of my friends who were asked to write their own recommendations. They were good students, but they did not stand out. Therefore, the profs wanted to help them out, but did not think they were worth the time. </p>

<p>Again, I agree with you, in University settings, it’s difficult to get to know students well enough. But it’s also up to the students to be proactive and be the best they can be, so their professors will take notice. By proactive, I do not mean brown nosing. </p>

<p>Personally, I would never want to see a recommendation written for me. I am willing to provide CV’s, term papers, etc, for the prof to get a better idea, that would be OK.</p>

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<p>Yes, it’s ethical. It’s also something that is commonly done in the business world.</p>

<p>The person making the recommendation gets to revise the recommendation, and that could mean completely changing it if the recommender doesn’t think what was written was appropriate.</p>

<p>By signing the letter, the recommender is saying that they support the content of the letter.</p>

<p>I recently produced a recommendation this way for a former student. She drafted the recommendation for me, and I revised it before signing it. She had a better memory than I did of the things that I had admired about her work, and about the things that I had seen that would help her gain entrance to a graduate program in a different field than I had taught. My revision, however, added information that I thought would help her gain entrance to graduate programs.</p>

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<p>Do you really think that a U.S. Supreme Court judge writes the opinion that he signs? Does the President of the U.S. write his own speeches, etc.? Does every business person write his own letters? Puleeze ! The answer is, of course, no. They all have “people” and minions to do this writing. (Here, you, as the writer, are one such minion.) However, by signing the paper, they are adopting what was written for them as their own as if they had written it themselves from scratch. They have the option to, and usually do, make changes, even adding a “not” where they think is appropriate, or completely deleting thoughts. If the thing is so far off the mark or untrue, they have the option of not signing it. I do not preare my tax return, my accountant does – but my signing the tax return is my adopting of his work, and could send me to jail, even though I did not prepare the tax return. It does not matter who writes the thing, what matters is if it is signed.</p>

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<p>The intent of the letter of recc is that the professor shares his thoughts on the student. It’s not for professors to simply agree with what the student says about himself. The two methods can produce very different results.</p>

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<p>Of course I don’t think the justices actually write their own opinions or that POTUS actually writes his speeches. But that’s not the issue I’m concerned about.</p>

<p>Hawkwing’s comment brings me to a comparison in accounting. A rec is similar to a financial audit. Do the firm in questions accountants prepare an audit and then give it to the independent guys to sign off on? No. That’s against the principles of GAAP, and the law. </p>

<p>I agree with Hawkwings assessment that the two can produce very different results.</p>

<p>@Northstarmom</p>

<p>Could the student have provided you with a brag sheet or CV that described her accomplishments (and perhaps what you noticed about her work) that would have given you the necessary information to write a good rec? Wouldn’t that have provided you the same information as the student writing a recc about herself in the third person?</p>

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<p>“Could the student have provided you with a brag sheet or CV that described her accomplishments (and perhaps what you noticed about her work) that would have given you the necessary information to write a good rec? Wouldn’t that have provided you the same information as the student writing a recc about herself in the third person?”</p>

<p>No. Those things wouldn’t have helped because to write a strong (with “strong” referring to being a detailed, specific one) recommendation, I needed specifics about things that the student had done in my class – papers written, things that I’d complimented the student on – and in activities that I advised. An overall CV wouldn’t have helped. The student would have remembered more about these things than I would have. Still, if a student had lied, I also would have realized that.</p>

<p>A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a recc for a former student whom I had last seen 10 years ago. She’s now applying to grad school after working in the interim. She drafted the recommendation for me, and I revised it. She had included a couple of things that I had forgotten (but that I remembered when I read them), and I included some things that she’d forgotten. The program that she was applying for differed from the subject that I had taught her, so I also needed her help drafting the letter because I didn’t know what might be information that I could convey that would be useful to that graduate program.</p>

<p>The people whom I have asked to draft their recommendations have been stellar students whom I had had a close relationship with. I knew that I could trust their honesty, and I also knew that they had done many things that impressed me: I just wanted to make sure that my recommendation included most of those things. I also used the drafts to help the students realize what their strengths were and how to write recommendation letters. I also always shared with them my final version of their recc letters. </p>

<p>Occasionally, I was asked to write reccs for students who were mediocre. I did not ask them to draft their reccs because I didn’t trust their judgment about what to write. Some were very bad writers, so I would have had to start from scratch in writing their reccs even if they drafted the recommendations. Some also had higher opinions of themselves than I had.</p>

<p>I would, though, let them know beforehand what I’d write so if they didn’t want me to write their recc, they could find someone else. For instance, a student who was one of the dimmest students whom I ever taught had struggled to get a “C” in my class, and had achieved that grade by doing extra credit.</p>

<p>I told him that I would put in his recc that he was personable, respectful, and a very hard worker who had managed to pass with a “C” a class that some of the top students in the department had to take over (In case you’re wondering, they had to take it over because they procrastinated and waited until the last minute to start writing their major papers, which was the bulk of their grades. While they had exceptional writing talent, it wasn’t possible to do a major research paper that met the course objectives at the last minute.)</p>

<p>Apparently what I wrote was good enough because he got into the graduate program and eventually got his doctorate from there. Based on his being able to get his doctorate from that program, however, I lost all respect for that university, but that’s another story. A graduate student from that university whom I met recently told me that her program accepted her application several months after the deadline, and allowed her recommendation letter to be written by one of her college friends, who like she, had graduated from college just the year before.</p>

<p>Back to recommendation ethics: What wouldn’t be ethical would be for a professor to have a student write their own recommendation letter, sign it as if they were the professor, and then mail it. That would be fraudulent. Drafting a letter and then giving it to the recommender to revise, however, isn’t fraudulent because the recommender could make any revisions they deemed necessary.</p>