I’m a junior in high school and I’ve been thinking of who to ask for teacher recommendations next year. I’ve been thinking of asking my honors pre calc teacher and and my computer science teacher. Is computer science considered a core subject? Would it be okay to ask them for a teacher recommendation? I only have them for the second semester of junior year but I will take the second and third levels of computer science my senior year which means I would have the same teacher again. So is it okay for me to ask my computer science teacher for a teacher recommendation?
Unless a school specifies type of teacher, I’d think it was ok. People may say that you should have letters from “core” (math, science, English, history) teachers but I think it best to get letters from those teachers who know you well and whose class you took recently. Even better is if they know you in more than one way (as a teacher and coach, for example). I also don’t think it has to be a teacher whose class you found easy. A good story about overcoming difficulties and prevailing with a decent but not necessarily perfect grade can show your grit.
^this
A common mistake people make is choosing teachers whose class they performed well in even though the teacher doesn’t actually know them very well. The college can already see your transcript. Choose people who will highlight who you are as a person.
Also, it wouldn’t hurt to ask your Guid counselor to review your list – they know who are the better writers (all other things being equal) and can recommend appropriately.
I think choosing the right teachers is one of the most difficult things to do, and it doesn’t help that you don’t know who the good vs mediocre writers are. We found out via earlier recommendations that my son’s orchestra teacher wrote the most generic of recommendations. We had not planned on any extra recommendations, but it was crystal clear that his would not be helpful! My older son had to get one STEM and one humanities/social science teacher for a recommendation and ended up using that pair for all his recommendations. In retrospect he might have been better off using two STEM teachers at some schools. While he got good grades in his non-STEM courses, it was clear he did the minimal work to get his A. He ended up using his Latin teacher which was the only non-STEM course he was enthusiastic about, and he’d had the teacher for four years in a row to boot.
My younger son chose his pre-calc teacher even though he’d only gotten a B+ in the course. The teacher wrote that even though his grades were less than perfect, he actually understood the mathematical thinking behind the concepts better than his fellow students who were better at memorizing formulas. Meanwhile the history teacher gave him practically a novel to write for his information before he’d write a letter. (Among the more interesting questions he asked students was what was their favorite text in APUSH and why.)
Anyway asking your GC if he/she knows who writes a good recommendation is a good idea. If you have friends in college from your school you could ask them. Be aware that some colleges (one at least!) won’t want two STEM teachers. And good luck.
every student asking for recs should ask the teacher(s) whether they can write a positive letter for you. This is always appropriate, phrased politely of course. For example, “Am I a student you would write a strong letter of reccomendation for, or do you suggest I ask someone else?” Don’t argue or question why if the answer is ask someone else, simply to thank the teacher for their honest answer.
While it can be uncomfortable for a student to ask a direct question like this to a teacher, it HAS to be done. I know someone who was on the alumni scholarship committee for a well-known U and they regularly received letters of “rec” for the full-tuition scholarship that raked the kid over the coals.
In “The Gatekeepers”,in which a NY Times reporter followed the admissions committee at Wesleyan for a year, is a real-world example of a bad rec. Obviously when the student asked for a rec she assumed it would be positive, but here is what she got:
This could have been avoided if the teacher had been asked if they would write a strong rec. The student did not get in.
I have another question- I know a lot of students that apply to multiple schools that require recommendation letters. Do these students just ask the same teachers…or different ones??? And how do you ask them for like 10 recommendation letters at once…!!!
When a teacher writes a rec letter, that same letter will be submitted to all schools that require one. The teacher won’t be writing different letters for each school.
As noted before, your recommenders are generally the same across all colleges. The common app system makes it easy for them to submit electronically to multiple schools.
Many schools like one STEM (science, math etc.) teacher and one humanities (ex. English, SS) teacher so you can show some breadth. I would hesitate to use a math and comp. science teacher. You should talk to your guidance counselor about this. Even my D who is a science kid, got one recommendation from an English teacher.