Strategy for Recommendations

Question re: Common App or the general college application. If the school does not require a teacher recommendation, but it’s optional, should we ask a teacher to do it? I know my D’s recommendations would be strong, but I also don’t want to overwhelm the teacher with D applying to 20 schools. Is your advice different if it’s through Common App, i.e. does Common App allow the teacher to write one recommendation that will be distributed to all? Thanks!

Not 100% sure, but I think they use the same letter for all the schools in the common app.

Some schools ask for specific letters from specialized teachers.

My D applied to 14 schools, almost all were on the CA and the teachers only needed to upload one letter. Hope that helps!

If your school is on Naviance or Parchment, then the teacher writes one letter and it gets uploaded by the counselor at the same time as the transcript, and all the schools require transcripts. I have been struck by how many schools require a counselor recommendation, but the counselors at our school have a general format that they fill out for that and they are used to it. Ask early because one of DD’s preferred references has a hard limit on the number of students he will recommend. We also found that BoCo asks for names & emails of references on their application, but then doesn’t require any letters of rec!! Be careful with this one–they will email the references independently so be sure you notify first.