<p>From your experiences with college admissions, are public high school counselor recommendations all that important? In my school, each counselor has so many students that some of them don’t even know us by name. What would happen if colleges don’t receive anything from the counselor?</p>
<p>If the GC LOR/SSR is mandatory, then your file would be considered incomplete without it. Better to have a generic GC LOR than none at all. </p>
<p>BTW, adcoms have been assessing applications for years, they know that many public school GCs are overloaded and don’t have extensive personal knowledge of all students.</p>
<p>This web page addresses your exact problem: [Writing</a> Recommendations | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs]Writing”>How to write good letters of recommendation | MIT Admissions).</p>
<p>Long story short: entomom is exactly right (which is hardly surprising).</p>