<p>Thanks to worldshopper for mentioning this article</p>
<p>
[quote]
Big backfire </p>
<p>Recommendations are supposed to be confidential and sent directly from the teacher to the college. But McLaughlin says that many teachers "don't want parents to get on their case," so they allow them to preview the letter.</p>
<p>Though admission deans decry the practice, they are not surprised. Observes TCU's Brown: "It's another way to game the process."</p>
<p>Forged recommendations, while relatively rare, are another way to undermine the process. </p>
<p>Poch recalls one case in which the forgeries took the form of negative recommendations designed to derail the chances of two students who attended the same high school as a third applicant. </p>
<p>Poch suspected that the letters were phony, so he called the school. "The counselor gasped and the teacher was furious," he says. Poch believes the parent of the third applicant wrote the phony letters, hoping it would somehow improve her child's chances.</p>
<p>But the story had a happy outcome. The two unfairly maligned students were admitted. The third was rejected.
<p>"Ray Brown, dean of admissions at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, advises students to ask teachers if they can provide a positive recommendation. "If the teacher doesn't immediately say yes, then grab the recommendation form back and run to find somebody else."</p>
<p>Colleges could help by dropping the entire process of asking letters of recommendations. Since that will not happen, as it tends to remove the last bastion of relevance for GCs, they could rename this much maligned process fraught with favoritism and injustice. </p>
<p>The term letter of recommendation is ludicrous as the colleges clearly seek an assessment and NOT a recommendation. A letter of recommendation SHOULD always be positive and NOT contain ANY reservations. Colleges could help by requesting ASSESSMENTS and drop the misleading term used nowadays.</p>
<p>One of the great ways to have legitimate input into the rec process is to provide the teachers/gc with as much information as possible. Our gc gives parents a series of essay questions about their child, which I filled out with enormous care (giving specific examples wherever possible to support my descriptions). I was cognizant of the fact that a busy gc who may not be the greatest writer in the world, might lift whole sentences. Also, one of the teachers who both my kids used gave similar questions to the students, and my kids treated these as serious essays for the same reason. And of course, they also submitted a detailed resume to anyone who was writing a recommendation for them.</p>
<p>Parents forging teacher recs - I wonder how often that happens. I'll have to watch my stationary supply.</p>
<p>As a parent who went through this twice with GCs who were writing 300 recs, I understand giving the GC an information nudge. However, as a teacher, I have never lifted content from a student's paperwork (i.e. resumes/short essays for this purpose). I try to limit myself to about 10 recs each year. First come, first served, and only those for whom I will be able to write a positive rec (the others never dream of asking...). I interview each student to gain additional insight on, among other things, what was memorable about my course - their interest and their performance, and how their academic needs were met/challenged in my class. In every single case, unusual and interesting anecdotes end up being discussed which enhance my rec. I also ask the kids to write up a sentence or two about "why college X is great for me and vice versa" in case I find it applicable to include. I send it separately, with my signature across the seal. I do not share the letter with my students, but if they ask, I will discuss the general contents with them.</p>
<p>Xiggi, for what it's worth, the Common Application uses the term "Teacher Evaluation Form." It does not prevent people from talking about recs and recommendation letters, just as it does not prevent us from talking about adcoms when we are actually referring to single members of admission committees. Nor does it prevent parents from thinking that the only appropriate evaluation is a positive one, undistinguishable from a recommendation.</p>
<p>Whether it's a recommendation, assessment, or evaluation, students and parents will only seek out letters that are entirely positive. Indeed, it would be foolish (from an individual standpoint) to do otherwise.</p>
<p>At the same time, I do believe that the writer should be honest when asked to write such a letter. In a perfect world, students will choose recommenders who can write positive but entirely honest letters. Since this is the way most turn out anyway, colleges tend to rely on them more for anecdotal evidence of student characteristics than whether they are positive or negative.</p>
<p>I agree with the TCU guy - it's wise to ask if the teacher can write a positive evaluation. Only a real snake would say "yes" and then torpedo a student.</p>
<p>Most of these posts are assuming that there is a stellar evaluation to be had for every student, and it's just a matter of finding the right person to write it. But speaking as someone who writes evaluation letters, that whole premise is wrong. In a perfect world every student would be "one of the best in my career". But it isn't a perfect world. Even when teachers like the students they are evaluating and want to do the best they can for those students, the teachers are necessarily limited by the traits of the students themselves. It is entirely possible that the most positive thing that any teacher can honestly say about a particular student is that they don't have any behavior problems or that they make a reasonable effort or that they are usually on time. Is that a "positive evaluation"?</p>
<p>Teachers may be able to come up with personal anecdotes showing the student in a good way for every student they know well. Those anecdotes, while "fleshing out the applicant", may or may not really have much to do with their likely success in college. (I was hospitalized and missed a bunch of school after a car wreck in grad school and ended up with an evaluation from one of my profs that said I "heal well"!)</p>
<p>There's also more to the evaluation than the letter where the teacher can say whatever they want to. What about those forms where colleges ask for the student's "major weakness"? And what about those grids where the teacher is supposed to classify students as "average", "above average", "top 10%", etc in various areas? On average, most kids in a teacher's experience are going to be average, and some are actually going to be (shudder!) below average, however much the teacher might like them and want them to get into a good college. There's also the problem of the math geek who has to have a letter from a humanities teacher, or the poet who has to have a letter from a math/science teacher. It's hard for those students to pick someone to ask, and it's hard for the teacher to honestly answer the questions on the form, however much they might want to say only good things about every student.</p>
<p>I agree totally. Saying that a student is hard-working and diligent may be a kiss of death for highly selective colleges, but that may be all that a teacher can say about a student who does not have behavior problems but is otherwise "average."</p>
<p>Recommendations are not only supposed to talk about the positive of a student, but reveal his/her faults as well. We're not all perfect after all.</p>
<p>I agree that recommendations should also positively address areas of weakness in the context of how the student deals with them. My math/science D asked her AP Eng Lang teacher for a letter to address her difficulties with writing and the ends to which she went to improve these skills during the year (there isn't a creative bone in her body). This woman worked quite a bit with D as she struggled to improve her writing skills. D wanted a voice to speak to how she grew during that class and to complement the ones from her math/science teachers which addressed her natural talent. The admissions officer at her LAC hand-wrote a note on her acceptance letter specifically referring to the character revealed in her recommendations.</p>
<p>The service academies specifically ask for a student's weak areas in my discipline and ask for my recommendation of additional preparation or a specific course placement.</p>
<p>Again, in a perfect world, recs should show both the negative and positive of a student. However, when an elite college sees two applicants, one who has a glowing, completely positive rec and the other who has a glowing, very accurate rec, they will probably take the student whose weaknesses aren't seen in any part of the application.</p>
<p>hmm....
I am an international...
My school gives the option of sending recommendation letters and school reports separately OR....send everything in one packet...but individual teacher evaluations will be signed and sealed within in an envelope that goes inside the whole packet. This packet is then sealed by the guidance counselor and then sent from the school directly.
We do this to avoid Very High international mailing costs!!
But yaa..there are a few rich guys who intend to send it separately...</p>
<p>I am wondering.......this process is official and authentic.... right??</p>
<p>It's nice to hear some HS teacher's views on writing recs. Many teachers like Maize&Blue limit themselves to just a few recs and then do a bang-smashup job for the kids they choose to recommend. The only problem is that large suburban, competitive high schools often have 3 or 4 levels of course difficulty and large class sizes. With 30 kids in the highest-level, junior-year AP English class, for instance, 20 pretty smart kids could get left in the cold ...</p>
Not to put too melodramatic a tone on here but there are snakes who will do just that. Poisonous ones. They are not urban myth. "If you ain't the pet, it's time to fret." J. Cochran</p>
<p>well, what the student considers to be "torpedoing" by a "poisonous snake" may in fact be an accurate and fair assessment, and be the best rec a particular student is going to get from anyone.</p>
<p>I think teacher (and counsellor) recs are a crock. Most good students are just that - good students, bright kids. And it will show in their grades and test scores. While there will occasionally be the exceptional student who can inspire something other than the rote, formulaic letter of recommendation produced by 90% of the teachers on behalf of 90% of all college-bound students, is it really worth the time and trouble for all concerned? At my kids' school there are over 500 student for each counsellor. Unless a kid sets the cafeteria on fire there's really not much reason for a counsellor to have much of an idea of who he is that isn't obvious from the student's transcript. </p>
<p>Yes there will be exceptions, students who don't fit the mold, or are that, once-in-a-teacher's-career inspirational student. But they're all going to end up going to college somewhere. Why put the students, teachers, counsellors, and adcoms through what is usually a meaningless charade? I find it difficult to believe that the labor-intensive ritual actually adds much to the college admissions process in terms of separating student A from student B in terms of which one ends up at X Univ. and which goes to Z College.</p>
<p>I guess as a student, I place a great deal of importance on the recommendations of my teachers just because they provide a different insight on my character than I could do just on my own, more so than a first impression I could make with an interviewer, and more so than the written impression of an application. I guess quite bluntly it's an opportunity for me to showcase my character from someone else's view, and expose a different part of me I wouldn't think of exposing in order to get into college. Certainly, it's not fair that counselors have 500 students to handle, but is that something that should inhibit others who could take advantage of that opportunity? Instead of blaming the system, I would blame the lacking support for public education.</p>