Teacher Recommendations - are they truly helpful?

A number of years ago there was a kid who posted regularly on CC who was very highly motivated to attend college, but had horrible test scores. (Absolutely dismal - way below median scores for any selective colleges). He also needed financial aid & was focusing on CTCL types of schools – many posters were quite dismissive of his chances. But he actually got accepted to a bunch of colleges --almost all that he applied to – with sufficient financial aid to allow him to attend. He shared with me a LOR that a teacher had written – and it was no surprise to me that he was excepted, given the very positive recommendation.

No one claimed that the kid was “exceptional” – nor did he need a LOR to establish that – but he was passionate about his interests; self-motivated; hard-working; an eager and active class participant; and active in a sport as well as a time-consuming EC tied to a potential major or area of study in college.

That’s the point of a LOR to ANY selective college. The GPA and test scores told one story, the LOR told another.

It is not at all a waste of time for teachers to write LORs for those kids. If anything, it’s probably a lot more important that those kids get the benefit of LOR’s, because they don’t have the easy path to a great college that the kids with the amazing stats who are applying to mega selective colleges have. These are the sort of kids where that LOR can make a huge difference. Because sometimes kids who have imperfect academic records have great potential, and that’s what a LOR can reveal.

I’m sure there are many other kids who have benefited in similar ways – but the example above is the only situation other than my own kids where I’ve actually seen the LOR.

Maybe it should be the other way around. The “exceptional” don’t need more help – it’s the kids with the rough edges who benefit most from holistic admission considerations, and where the opinion of a teacher might actually make a difference in admissions.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I have a kid who fits into that category. Great kid; smart, involved and engaged, but due to serious family illnesses and a LD she’d had a very rough academic patch. At the stats driven schools her admissions results were just about what would have been predicted, but at the schools that gave weight to LORs she way over performed, including acceptance to a not score optional school at which her ACT was a full 3 points below the lower margin of the 50th percentile and one of her main sub scores landed her in the 1st percentile. Her overall GPA was not strong, so I can only imagine that what made the difference was the story told in her essays and LORs. One of those who wrote her a LOR had given her a C so I can’t imagine he was checking off the “best ever” boxes, but he must nevertheless have had positive things to say about her.

I’m convinced that my D19’s LORS helped her immensely with admissions. She was lucky to have a number of people volunteer to write them without her even asking, and their enthusiasm about her abilities and potential probably shone through. We didn’t get to read them, of course, but we were able to read one that a same person had written for a specific award, and it was pretty outstanding. My daughter needed the bump of these letters because she was homeschooled and her test scores were below the 25% for most schools where she applied- and she needed significant financial aid.

Don’t most schools only ask for one or 2? Why are so many people talking about getting more than that?

Good LoRs are vital to all kids. They’re one educator talking to others. A super great set may help a borderline kid. But that doesn’t mean top colleges dont need similar perspectives on top candidates.

Many here are guessing, but didn’t see the letters, don’t know.

One school info session we attended highlighted that students shouldn’t automatically ask for LORs from the teachers whose classes they’ve done best in. They emphasized that a LOR from a teacher whose class the student has struggled in, and where they teacher can write about things like determination/ grit/ability to rebound, etc, can be among the most impressive type of LOR they get.

@VickiSoCal , it seems to be a trend that people think the more they get the better. I was a bit worried seeing all the applicants on CC do extra than the one teacher one D19 got (school required one teacher and one GC), but she got in and many others with 3 or more didn’t… One of the info sessions we attended actually said (paraphrased) “ we ask for one, don’t send more than two. It wastes time for AOs who have to read them if they’re in there, it’s highly unlikely that the third and more will say anything substantive that the first one or two haven’t, and the more you ask for the more the chance that someone says something that casts a negative light - your first one or two choices will usually be best recommenders”.

Most LACs ask for one rec. from a math/science teacher, one from a humanities teacher, and one from a GC. Some of the large public schools D applied to asked for only one teacher rec. or only a GC rec. and one didn’t want any supplementary materials at all.

One thing I think some kids don’t pay enough attention to is the writing ability of the recommender. A teacher can be a kid’s biggest fan in the world, but if they can’t express on paper what makes that kid special the recommendation isn’t going to be very valuable. OTOH I’ve seen talented writers write letters for mediocre students that would make me want to admit that kid on the spot.

What is the best way to address the fact that:

A. LoRs are uncompensated work given by colleges to high school teachers who may have to ration them, possibly denying some applicants the useful insight that you consider “vital to all”?

B. LoRs in practice inject a significant factor that is not student achievement based into the process, in that the LoR writer may be good or bad at writing LoRs (see second paragraph of reply #26), and the applicant’s choice of LoR writers (possibly affected by LoR rationing) may or may not be those with the best insight.

There is, unfortunately, a lot of uncompensated work asked of teachers.
Any application that requires a reference (job, internship, licensing, etc) will require that reference.

I don’t see value in speculating someone may not be a good writer. Adcoms look for the info LoRs do provide. And they are good at looking for the salient points, if any. What do you seriously propose? Earlier, someone said just offer them for borderline or sleeper kids. Even so, you could get a poorly written letter.

More difficult is kids who provide letters from teachers out side their interests, from years ago, or not academic, at all.

This isn’t the thread about teachers closing the gates- that one stuns me. That’s a poor school policy.

After you get over your surprise, you now know that applicants who lose out to LoR rationing are at a significant disadvantage in showing what you think are things that LoRs can show, even though that may not be due to any fault of their own.

Lol, adcoms at top colleges aren’t club bouncers, who like your look or deny access. They look for what matters to them. Plenty of teachers write disengaged letters. “Johnny has been my student in xxx. He’s also in band and plays soccer.”

That’s a front end problem. Not a reason to look for less info on a student and turn holistic into stats based process.

And if an adcom faces a poor letter, the comment might be, “LoR adds little.” Then, the rest had better make up for that. And they aren’t grading the quality of a letter. Rather, looking for the perspective it adds. The relevant perspective.

@VickiSoCal most of the schools where my D19 applied required two and allowed up to four, plus an additional non-teacher rec (mentor, coach, pastor, employer). My D also used different recs for different schools based on our judgement of what the school was looking for in its students. She had six recs and spread them amongst her schools and scholarship apps.

To talk about what @SJ2727 said, my D’s various recs did speak to different things, I think, because they came from different environments- a couple were regular college professors, one was an honors college professor, one a mentor in a college research program, one a privately- hired teacher/field expert, and one from a boarding school. They were also all from different areas and played to different strengths. If it annoyed the adcoms it wasn’t to the detriment of D’s admissions results- one, the one she’ll be attending, had four recs and requested a specific fifth be forwarded along during the process.

Gosh, I hope a teacher didn’t spend more time writing someone’s sixth reference as they did my kid’s one.

Ok, listen up you entrepreneurial types! This thread has given me a business idea that I will never implement myself, and so I hereby offer it up to the CC community. The need is to facilitate teachers getting some compensation for writing LORs, and here are the specifics:

  • a website, e.g. "MyLOR.com" (I haven't checked whether this specific name is available or not), is used to screen LOR requests.
  • the website allows the creation of free, secure and confidential student accounts.
  • each student account can create a “cheat sheet” of their EC’s, courses, leadership, passions, commitment to causes, etc.
  • each student account can create LOR requests directed to specific teachers. These requests would include the classes taken, grades received and any notable class accomplishments.
  • the website allows the creation of secure instructor accounts to receive the student LOR requests.
  • the instructor accounts will offer a wide variety of options for preprocessing the provided "cheat sheets" and student data into LOR templates according to instructor preferences. Various syntactic and semantic checks are also provided (e.g. 'You say Brenda is 'best ever', but you previously said Susie was 'best ever'. Are you sure?".)
  • when LOR requests are submitted, a window pops up reminding the students that teachers are not paid to write LORs and to offer the option of including a "thank you gift". If this option is selected, a list of instructor pre-selected gifts of varying values is displayed. If any of these are selected, a separate merchant account window opens to process the payment information.
  • the website will periodically query the instructor as to whether the LOR has been submitted. The "pings" will become progressively more frequent and urgent as the submission deadline approaches.
  • Once the LOR is submitted, the student account will received notification.

In practice, the teacher will ask students to use MyLOR.com for LOR requests and for any LOR-related communications. If asked about the “gift”, the instructor should say that that message is from the website, not them, and can be ignored. The student benefit of receiving an automatic notification when the LOR has been submitted by the instructor should be emphasized.

Revenue for the website owners can be generated by a variety of mechanisms common to e-commerce, such as charging a fee for the instructor accounts, adding small surcharges for the gifts, selling ads on the website, or some combination of these.

Anyway, that’s my idea. Maybe something like “Evite”, but specifically for LORs.

^ Naviance does much of this. I don’t think the teacher bribery idea would go over well with my kids’ high schools.

Our school doesn’t have Naviance.