<p>What do the top colleges look for in teacher recommendations? (i.e. concrete examples about student, defined characteristics of student)</p>
<p>I don’t know if all Teacher recommendation forms are like this, but here is an example of one from The George Washington University.</p>
<p><a href=“http://gwired.gwu.edu/adm/pdf/TeacherRecmnd06F.pdf[/url]”>http://gwired.gwu.edu/adm/pdf/TeacherRecmnd06F.pdf</a></p>
<p>i wonder how seriously teacher recs are taken into consideration…as teachers can easily just put “best i’ve seen in my career” a lot and use it very loosely because they like you and want to see you get accepted…I’d say the written part would be more useful in the application process i guess.</p>
<p>Teachers can’t easily put “best in career” if s/he is recommending many/several people to the same college. This is certainly more true at a competitive high school so “best in career” should accordingly be more valuable there than at a normal high school.</p>
<p>cory123: app readers know that the experience of teachers varies and their ability to convey useful information. Certainly an inexact science, readers do their best to extrapolate. However, to say what is written isn’t read seriously would be a mistake. A well thought out essay with concrete anecdotes will definitely capture a reader’s attention. Also, I’d say that most teachers while being advocates for students, aren’t going to fabricate out of whole cloth statements just to get them into schools – they’re pretty confident that you’ll get in somewhere anyways – why should they lie when the very next year, the “once in a lifetime” student does come their way? They have a reputation to think about as well. </p>
<p>Negative aspects can also be conveyed in what ISN’T said about a student as well (e.g. known cheater – it wouldn’t be written as such but that easily could be communicated in certain “buzz words”).</p>
<p>Adcoms read 1000s of these and a certain “feel” develops. They’re still useful to them. At least that’s my two cents.</p>