My son requested recommendations from 3 teachers and his research mentor. He is targeting some top schools, all of which require two teacher recs and allow optional extras. He was planning to send recommendations from one teacher and the mentor to all schools (they should be really good), and split the other two (likely good, but not amazing), because some schools require a letter from a humanities teacher, but for those which did not he preferred the letter from a science teacher. He handed a list with the correct schools to everybody, but it turned out all teachers have sent their letters to all colleges on CA. Should he worry that there are too many letters and colleges won’t like this? Write a note about this in the additional info? Or it’s no big deal?
Anyone? The CC common knowledge seems to be that extra LORs hurt the application instead of helping, but it’s not his fault, and I don’t see any way to remove them. The school is doing this through Naviance.
This is the crux of the matter. The interface between Naviance and the Common App is not standardized; each school is slightly different. So taking you at your word that all recs were sent to all schools, what’s done is done. An AO cannot unread a rec and it is, IMO, pointless to call it out to the colleges. If there are colleges that are still to be added, or if there are some recs that have yet to be sent, that’s something the GC needs to fix, if it’s possible,
I assume they’re not reading them yet as no applications have been submitted.
Then in all likelihood, no recs have actually been sent, but these are all questions to ask the GC and get him/her to figure out.
Our district is not on Naviance so I there may be something weird about the interface, but at least for D and S’s CA submissions a couple of years back, there was a separate screen for each college that allowed you to choose which LoR’s in the pool of submitted LoR’s you wanted to use for that school.
@BKSquared Right, but it looks like all the letters have already been submitted through Naviance and we can’t change anything. I’ll tell him to talk to the GC.
The big problem as I just realized is that some schools don’t allow more than 2 letters from teachers on CA, and the teacher who actually said she was going to write a glowing rec (and teaches math which is his chosen major), submitted last, so she didn’t get in there. It would be a shame if this turns out to be a straw that broke the application, not that we’ll ever know. I guess we or she can contact the admissions directly.
Right. As I said upthread, for the OP’s situation, it’s Naviance that’s the problem. If the recs were assigned via the Common App, there would not have been the issue.
Again, it will require some GC coordination, but if s/he can’t resolve systemically, the extra letter can always be sent old-school - with a stamp.
So the GC promised she would contact the colleges which only allow two recommendations and make sure they have the right ones. The rest will still have 3 teacher LORs and one for the research mentor. Is this too much? Would this be annoying enough for the adcoms that it may make sense to mention the mix-up in the application?