<p>My D went to a private school. Teachers were more than willing to write recommendations - as many as necessary.</p>
<p>My S goes to a relatively large public school, and there have been several meetings regarding applying to school … with lots of discussion about choosing the right teachers for recommendations. Next thing you know, his teachers begin telling everyone that they are all booked up for recommendations. So, let’s see: one chem teacher, one bio teacher, one physics teacher, three English teachers for all of the honors/AP classes. Thirty kids per class, and each teacher has 6 classes per day. While I understand the difficulty for teachers … what about the kids? I told my son that he really needs to have his bio teacher do a recommendation, because he is trying to get into a 6 year pharmd program. That is the teacher who truly can tell why S is an excellent candidate for this program.</p>
<p>We had Coffee with the Principal this morning, and I asked about limits on rec letters. The principal had not heard anything about this, and he said he would raise the issue with teachers. He also said it’s possible students who ask for a rec will still get one if the teacher feels comfortable writing one. We’ll find out!</p>
<p>Wow, a ten-letter limit! The AP Lit teacher at QMP’s high school had 80 letters to write one year. The administration hired a substitute teacher for her classes for about 3 days, to allow extra time to work on them. I think this was a great idea. I suppose that if all 80 had been applying to Harvard, that could have been a problem, but otherwise can’t see a reason to limit the number to 10.</p>
<p>How can one teacher effectively write 80 recommendation letters? It’s just not possible. At some point the quality of those letters is going to drop significantly. If my kid had picked a teacher who was writing 80 letter, I’d tell her to pick someone else.</p>
<p>S’s Calc teacher limits how many recs he writes – wrote S2’s name on his list last spring. The history teacher he would have liked to write a rec said he only writes them for kids he knows through the ECs he sponsors. Instead, S asked a different social studies teacher, who was delighted to do so. S also has one teacher this year for three classes and who thinks S is terrific.</p>
<p>I never heard of anyone at S1’s school imposing limits. He had a CS teacher and his AP World teacher, plus two external letters from professors.</p>
<p>RE: How long it takes to write a rec letter – I spent about six hours on each of my kids’ parental brag sheets that went to the GC. Considering the GCs don’t always know the kids very well, we considered this a very important task.</p>
<p>4gsmom - if the letters are written about the student and not particularly about the students particular fit with a certain school, then any teacher should only have to write one rec. per student who asks, not 8, 10 or 18 for one student.</p>
<p>the rec letters could be filed with the counselor and sent to several schools.
i don’t know if this is how they do it, but they certainly could.</p>
<p>Lafalum84, I understand your skepticism about the 80 letters. I think it was workable because of the places the students were applying:
Strong state flagship–calls for a good letter, but does not need a highly-crafted, “grab them by the lapels” kind of letter.
Many different LAC’s, including a number that are quite good, but not the most highly selective.
Not too many conflicting requests for letters to HYPSM. Don’t know for sure, but I would estimate the number of applicants to these schools somewhere between 20 and 40 per class, of whom only about 10 request letters from the AP Lit teacher–who also had many of the students in Brit Lit the year before.
With this particular combination of circumstances, and 1 rec. per student regardless of the number of schools the student applies to, it seemed to work out fine.</p>
<p>I would think that there would be only a few students for whom “fit” with a particular college would have to be discussed in the recommendation letter, and these would mostly be students with very specialized interests or those who are applying to unusual colleges.</p>
<p>For the more typical student, say one who is applying to the colleges of arts and sciences at Duke, Penn, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Emory, with state U as a safety, wouldn’t one letter work for all?</p>
<p>I can’t imagine asking any teacher to write a targeted letter for each school these days. Yikes! I think the LORs S1 requested for scholarships were the same letters that were sent ot the colleges. His teachers sent out LORs themselves and kept copies on file.</p>