Why does Case require 3 recommendations? How important are they? My son can get his teacher recommendations easily but he’s having trouble with the counselor recommendation. His counselor is out on maternity leave and he was told by the VP to make an appointment with the sub counselor so she can meet him in order to write the recommendation but she’s not responding to any emails.
Thanks
Many school requires a counselor recommendations, not just Case.
It’s only August, the sub counselor has plenty of time to meet with your son and write his recommendation.
I understand that many schools require counselor recommendations, but many do not as well. It just seems bizarre to me to base whether a student is admitted or not on a recommendation of someone that they don’t even know.
Honestly I don’t think counselor recommendation matters. The US is chock full of huge high schools with limited resources for counselors. In my D’s HS of 1800, her counselor was responsible for 400 students. He had each kid fill out a sheet so he could write a recommendation. He met my daughter twice. This is by no means uncommon and colleges know this. By the way mine applied to 17 colleges (CaseWesten included) and all asked for counselor rec. She was accepted with merit at all but 2 (including a full tuition award) so I don’t think her lack of a relationship with counselor had any impact. Only instance I can think of where it might matter would be a discipline problem or incident.
Ok. That’s good to know!
The counselor typically also discusses whether the student took “the most challenging curriculum” so at an IB World School, that would be the full IB diploma, and at an AP school, it would be based on number of AP courses, and if your student took a lot of them. The counselor recommendation cannot hurt a student, unless there is some discipline or legal problem, drugs, alcohol, that the school has become aware of. Colleges want to know about suspensions for instance. They can decide to not admit a student based on any legal or disciplinary issues that are uncovered in the counselor recommendation.
Thank you. I am not worried about anythig negative coming out as he doesn’t have anything negative to be reported. I just don’t like having to rely on others to get things done when he’s worked hard for himself. His counselor on maternity leave told him she would have his recommendation done by July 1 (he asked her in the spring), and now it is September and she is not reachable so he is now relying on the substitute to do it.