<p>Do any of your high school teachers announce a numerical limit on how many letters of recommendation they will write? D had asked a particular teacher back in the spring of junior year if he would write her letters. He said yes. This year, when she brought him the forms a week after school started (I told her not to bring them in any earlier, so as to give him a chance to settle in), he said "OK, you're number 7. I'm only doing this for 10 people." She was a little disturbed that she hadn't already been "saved" a spot on his list, ha ha, and we wondered what would have happened had she waited a day or two more? She miight have been out of luck, and it was only the beginning of September!</p>
<p>I understand that teachers don't have time to do hundreds of these, and I also understand that this service isn't required of them by their contract; it is considered a "personal favor." Still, despite D being much farther along in the application process than anyone else she knows, she almost missed the boat on this. Given that kids usually ask a junior year teacher and it should be in a major subject area, I can't imagine how if each teacher only agrees to write 10 references, that there wouldn't be many kids who won't be able to find anyone to write their letters for them!</p>
<p>What does the situation look like at your high school?</p>
<p>This was pretty typical at D’s school. Some of her teachers announced at the end of Jr year that they would write rec. letters to so many students. (I’m sure the teachers do it to deter “rec. letter cherry-pickers” and actually write more letters than they say they would)</p>
<p>A teacher who refuses to write more than 10 recommendations has poop between his ears. Especially since he apparently is doing it on a first-come, first-serve basis. So if the first ten kids are dolts, they get recommendations, but if the valedictorian is the 11th, she doesn’t?</p>
<p>My son’s school is pretty dedicated to getting their kids into college (95 out of 96 in last year’s graduating class), and I doubt the administration would tolerate a teacher who didn’t help by writing recommendations. Maybe you should mention this to the school principal.</p>
<p>My kids haven’t gotten to this point yet, but I have a problem with a teacher limiting recommendations to 10. Unlike you, I don’t regard this as a personal favor. This is something these students NEED, and they usually need them from junior year core subject teachers. I think writing letters of recommendation is part of the job of a high school teacher, whether it’s written into a contract or not. If enough teachers refused to write them, or limited them to a small number, it would start being written into the contracts, I suspect. All of that said, my understanding is that teachers at my kids’ high school are happy to write letters and while I’ve heard of teachers limiting the number they can do, it’s a pretty big number.</p>
<p>I talked about this once with an AP English teacher who wrote recommendations for all 3 of my sons. She limits herself to 12 letters each year…she said it takes her at least 4 hours to write each letter. </p>
<p>Before she writes the letter, she asks the student to give her a copy of the bragsheet that is also turned in to the high school GC, copies of papers from his time in her class, and also a memo from the student to her about particular highlights the student remembers from the class, and also any points she thinks she might want the teacher to touch on in her recommendaton…for example, to address any perceived weaknesses in the student’s application package. </p>
<p>She makes the effort to write in detail about each student and to include anecdotes of the student’s performance in her classes, etc.–she does not write generic letters of recommendation. She said she also lets the letter sit for a few days and then goes back and revises it (just as her students are supposed to do with their essays and papers) to make sure she said what she wanted to say and in the way she wanted to say it.</p>
<p>She doesn’t have the time to do more than about a dozen letters…she also has her teaching duties, her duties as advisor to the literary magazine, and maybe needs time for her family and hobbies (she shows dogs and is an accomplished glass artist).</p>
<p>mantori, I think that since there is no “official” list and count, this way the teachers have an easy way out of writing recommendations for kids that they have problems with. “Sorry, I’ve reached my limit”</p>
please tell me this is a gross exaggeration. I don’t possibly see how it could take an experienced teacher who had written lots of letters anywhere near 4 hours. </p>
<p>To the OP - I <em>think</em> the teacher was not being serious. A limit of 10 letters? That is absurd.</p>
<p>I haven’t heard of any teachers having limits in our school, but our APUSH teacher has found a method that I suspect keeps his numbers down. When you ask him for a recommendation he hands you a list of what he wants. His list:</p>
<ol>
<li>What did you struggle with and what did you do about it?</li>
<li>An explanation for why I should write you a recommendation.</li>
<li>Tell me a story about you and American History.</li>
<li>What is your favorite American History book and why?</li>
<li>A resume, or a list of ten things I should know about you</li>
<li>A copy of your transcript.
7.Copies of your term papers and the grading comments from APUSH.</li>
<li>Your score on the AP exam.</li>
</ol>
<p>Individual teachers had limits at my daughter’s school. My daughter was one of the few who approached her Spanish teacher in time to get a recommendation. The teacher had a strict limit of (if I remember correctly) 15 recommendations per year. She didn’t have time to write more because of her other responsibilities (she was the foreign language department head). On the other hand, a certain social studies teacher wrote more than 100 recommendations every year.</p>
<p>I don’t know of any cases where students were unable to apply to colleges because they could not get enough recommendation letters, but there undoubtedly were cases where students couldn’t get letters from the teachers they wanted because of individual teacher limits.</p>
<p>It might not be an exaggeration. I’ve seen letters that have clearly taken a while to draft, revise, and polish.</p>
<p>Just this past week, I wrote letters for several of my (college) students for a scholarship competition. I spent around 3 hours on each one. </p>
<p>I’ve seen lots of letters that are pretty cookie-cutter and clearly didn’t take a great deal of time. Depending on how the college uses the letters (at some places, they are key for acceptance; at others they are glanced at) the cookie cutter letters aren’t worth the paper they are written on.</p>
<p>The AP English 3 teacher my son had last year said she had a limit of letters for 12 students. Reportedly she had reached her limit by the end of junior year.</p>
<p>My D’s English Honors teacher requires that the students submit her a 2 page essay explaining why she should provide them with a recommendation. She then selects the essays she liked. D got a recommendation letter but she was one of only 6 students to write the essay and she gave a recommendation to 4 of the 6 students. I don’t think she has a limit but there were not many students willing to write the essay on short notice. She gave them a window of 2 days to write and submit them during finals week.</p>
<p>Our daughter’s teacher does not limit the number of recommendations he will write overall, but he does limit the number he will write to a single school. He feels that if he sends recs for more than five students to the same school, it will be hard to sound “fresh” to the admissions committee, and his words of praise will lose their impact.</p>
<p>Well, I can pretty much guarantee that this particular teacher is not spending that much time writing his letters. He’s not diligent enough to even grade papers half the time. Frankly, he was not an ideal choice for this task, but after examining her other options several times, D decided he was the best she had. Also, he had already done a letter for her for a special program to which she was accepted, so D figured his letter couldn’t have been bad and that he’d already have something to work with.</p>
<p>I mean, all it takes is for your child to have one weak subject area where s/he isn’t certain to get a good rec. (D’s is math), and another junior year teacher leave the school or be otherwise unavailable, and your choices are already down to 2 or 3. Some schools request that the recs be done by a certain teacher, and if I’m not mistaken, one of D’s schools did not consider foreign language to be a core class.</p>
<p>When D asked her teachers last year to do this, they both said “See me in the fall.” She followed their instructions and yet she felt like it could have ended badly.</p>
<p>There’s just no room for late bloomers in our system. So many kids don’t even have a clue where they’re applying yet!</p>
<p>None of this surprises me in the least. If you are in a system that sends a high percentage of students on to 4 year colleges just think what that would amount to for the handful of teachers that kids generally turn to for recommendations.</p>
At my son’s school there is an official recommendation form kids are required to give their teachers when asking for recs; the form includes a set of prompts exactly like this that the student is expected to fill out.</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of official “limits” but there are only a few teachers at our HS that kids would ask for recommendations. It was particularly difficult for D to find an English/Humanities teacher; she had English online junior year and didn’t feel the teacher “knew” her well enough to write a rec. Due to an unpleasant situation with the Journalism teacher (who would have been a logical choice as D was an Editor-in-Chief) she ended up turning to a prof she’d had for a summer course for those schools that specifically required a rec from an English or History teacher. Made for some tense moments.</p>
<p>At least two of the teachers at D1’s school will write letters for any student who asks, as long as students give enough lead time. A month seems to be sufficient, which I think is way too little. Each of these two writes at least 60 letters, out of a total graduating class of 80-90. The letters aren’t just fill-in-the-blanks templates. A counselor was mentioning that when adcoms from Columbia and Caltech did a recent campus visit, they asked to meet with those two teachers in particular because they were so impressed by the caliber and insight of the recommendations. I don’t know how that translates into acceptances, just matriculations in last two years (3 to Caltech, none to Columbia).</p>
<p>In addition to placing limits on the number of recommendations, some teachers impose other conditions. </p>
<p>One obvious one is requiring a resume or brag sheet.</p>
<p>Less obviously, both of the teachers who wrote recommendations for my daughter set the requirement that she submit all of the paperwork for all of her recommendations a month before the first one was due. Because she was applying Early Decision and therefore had a November 1 deadline from one college, this meant that she had to finalize her list of colleges by October 1. This caught us by surprise.</p>
<p>I find this unbelievable. My D and most of her whole of 40 asked one teacher (Music) for letters of rec at least 25 have gone on to music in college She gladly accomodated everyone them. My D even went back to her for 4 extras since she was applying for Scholarships as well and within a week we had them. No doubt these are a lot of work for the teachers but I bel;ieve it is a part of their job (may not be in their JD but morraly) Every letter she received from this teacher was different and specific for the need. Maybe I should realize just how lucky we were but I have honestly never heard of a teacher limiting the number they would write.</p>