Today we found out by chance that my son’s chemistry teacher submitted a letter of recommendation to 4 schools with the wrong college named in the last sentence of the letter. We found out only since the school was having trouble submitting documents thru Naviance to one college so the HS cc’ed me on the email they sent. The letter was wonderful except for the college name listed was incorrect and the teacher stated he was the faculty sponsor for the national honor society and my son is a member which he is not.
How much will the effect his admission chances?
It’s unknown, every college is different. But mistakes happen. These are complicated applications and they know it’s being filled out by a 17 year old. For every one mistake, admissions people have a hundred other excuses to turn students down. Either way, there’s nothing you can do about it. They understand that students are applying to multiple schools, so I’m sure it’s something they’ve seen before. Be sure to keep some good target and safety schools.
I would ask the guidance counselor to please send an email to the admissions rep for your region. One, you don’t want them to think the teacher wrote a rec for the wrong student, which they might do, given the reference to NHS. Two, students are NOT supposed to see teacher recs anyway, so an email should not come from your son. Three, this is clearly just a mistake on the teacher’s part, but if the guidance counselor emails, it is more credible and the college should be fine about it.
I’m sure they are used to it. The LORs are really not under the control of the students. I’ve seen some pretty bad grammar in some notes from teachers so I’m sure their letters of recommendations contain some too.
They’re much more interested I what the letter that’s to say about your son than an error made by a teacher which your son had no chance to see/catch.
I don’t think I’d ask for a follow-up unless there was some odd circumstance and the teacher was involved in having your son read it. As students aren’t supposed to see them, I’d be concerned if a student came to me asking for an update. Even if the student somehow had access to it, I would expect him to notify someone and shred/delete/not open it. To me, going ahead and reading it would reflect poor decision making unless, again, there was some reason he had to read it.
I should say that my son didnt read the letter and has no desire to. I was cc’ed on an email from the HS registrar confirming reciept of the letter to a college that they were having trouble sending documents to on Naviance (this was a college that he just recently decided to apply to so the last application). I looked at the letter myself and noticed the errors. I told my son about the errors but he never asked to look at the letter. I confirmed with the registrar today that the teacher submitted the letter at the beginning of October to all the schools he had indicated he was applying to on Naviance, even schools that do not consider recommendation letters. So I don’t know how Naviance looks on the teacher’s end, but it was only requested that he send it to 1 school, but somehow (I’m sure unintentionally) it was sent to all schools with another college’s name listed.
The GC said that if the college’s question the National Honor Society, they will call her and she will tell them it was an error on the teacher’s part. She said regarding the college name error that my son can call the admissions representative (from her office if he wants) and say the teacher told him of the error but he really wants to attend XXXX school or do nothing knowing that it was not his error. I think my son will no want to call but I will talk to him tonight about it. It might be best to just leave it alone at this point.
It’s just a shame that a student works so hard to do well in school and to submit good applications and then something that is out of his control like this happens.