<p>“without the fear of emails from students, parents, departments heads, or administrators kicking up a storm asking why they did not give Suzie a more glowing review, and don’t forget who signs your paychecks.”</p>
<p>That’s an element that really worries me. The kids will inevitably compare the letter content. One may be described as “the reason I love my job” and a higher ranked student in less glowing terms. This is asking for a mess.</p>
<p>This sounds lazy and strange to me. Maybe this jr. AP teacher is some kind of savant, but most people I know do not do their best writing in dictation form – they always tweak and rephrase as they see the words on the page/screen. Dictating the letter suggests to me that he doesn’t think it’s worth real effort. Who’s to say that the students are any good at taking dictation anyway? That’s not a skill that’s taught in HS or required for college. I also shake my head at a teacher announcing that he won’t do the recommendations online. Why not? If writing recs is part of his job – as most good HS schools expect – he should do it as the colleges request.</p>
<p>It’s unusual for a high school teacher to not write his/her own recommendations, or even to dictate them to kids. Colleges probably would not be pleased to find out that the strict confidentiality they try to maintain with these (in order to get the most honest report) is somewhat compromised in this way. Also, refusing to do recommendations online adds unnecessary stress and complication, as it means not all of the student’s packet will be delivered together if they’re doing Common App. Just seems a bit unfair to the kids. </p>
<p>In college however, this is very normal. Often if I asked for a letter of recc from a professor, they would ask me to either write it myself for them to edit, or at the very least write up a paragraph or two about why I wanted it/why I thought I was good for it (whatever it was) and send them a fresh resume and info about what I was applying to. But these were recommendations for a different purpose and they were not usually part of a standardized system like college apps are.</p>
<p>I agree that involving the student in the letter is the professor’s choice, and commonplace at the university level. But those students are, at least in theory, grownups. I think the proposed system is a lot for a 17-year-old to deal with.</p>
<p>I might be a lot more muted in my praise if it were delivered to a teenager’s face. The student shouldn’t be surprised by a letter saying that a teacher loves him, or likes him with reservations. But the devil is in the details. I would pause before telling a 17-year-old that he’s the brightest student I’ve ever taught. Is it good for him to hear that? Maybe not; it depends on the kid. But if it’s true, it certainly needs to be in a letter to Harvard. My preference would be to tell the kid a couple of years later, when he’s settled into college, just how impressed I was.</p>
<p>I typed my own letter once. When I asked for the rec my teacher said she would do it but the deal was that I had to sit at her computer and type it out with her. Seemed kind of weird but she dictated and read it over before we printed it out. It was a video production class and she was the only instructor in a school of 5000+ students that taught the course, so I would guess she gets a lot of rec requests. I didn’t really think anything of it since she dictated it word for word and read it before we printed it, otherwise I wouldn’t have submitted it.</p>
<p>I think all in all I had four or five rec letters and only one of them came to me in a sealed envelope. I guess I can understand why some would believe they should all be sealed. In my experience if an instructor didn’t have nice things to say they would decline to write the rec in the first place, and in that case I don’t know what difference it makes.</p>
<p>My kids always waived their right to see recommendations, and the recs were either sent directly to the school or sealed with the teacher signature across the seal.</p>
<p>The colleges value recommendations much more when the student and family have not seen them, and know they will not see them in advance.</p>
<p>I “waived my right” to see my recs, but still teachers gave them to me in a manila folder to bring them down to my guidance office to be added to my application. They told me I could read them if I wanted. One teacher did give them to me sealed.</p>
<p>I thought that all recs were supposed to be private and the students would not see them unless the teacher opted to give them a copy. At my kids school the teacher submitted the rec to the counselor who sent them on to the schools electronically. The students dont even touch them.</p>