How important are recommendation letters?

SAT128
Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:44:52 +0000

I’m not exactly sure if you were partly referring to me^

For the type of schools you seem to be targeting such as the ivy league, LORs will be fairly important. They won’t be as important as certain other aspects of your application such as GPA or test scores though. I honestly feel that unless the letter is really amazing or really mediocre, it shouldn’t have that significant an impact. And there is also the possibility that the teacher may just not be that good of a writer or as expressive as other teachers. It would be a little too unfair if adcoms put a serious amount of weight on such a subjective element of the application, although it is nonetheless still important at many top schools.

And there really is no question that affirmative action exists in boosting chances of URMs and lowering chances of ORMs atleast at the ‘top’ schools. Yes at most schools anyone in the top of their class should have no problems in being admitted, however you were asking about ivy league and simialr caliber schools. There is indeed a bias against asian applicants, while hispanic, american indian, or african american applicant can generally get in with slightly lower stats. These are all generalizations though ofc, as there are many aspects to an application other than ‘hooks’ like race/ethnicity.

As for the high-income thing, I definitely don’t think that there is a discrimination against high-income applicants and major leeway given to low-income students. However, I do feel as though there are occasional considerations given in reference to the amount of opportunities and privileges that a student has access to based on their financial situation. Nothing that will make a huge difference in an adcoms view of the applicant, however I do think it is sometimes a small consideration. I can’t imagine that adcoms wouldn’t recognize that many high-income applicants may have access to tutoring, test prep, summer programs, trips to africa, no need to hold a minimum wage job, etc. while low-income applicants may not have such luxuries. Like I said, there are many subjective elements to an application.