@calmom wrote “This probably comes as a huge surprise, but the vast majority of students who need LOR’s are applying to schools other than Harvard (or equivalent).”
LOL You’re right! Always thought the IVY’s get 2 million plus apps every year, and then the vast undersea Atlantis conspiracy transports the excess applications to the league of UU’s (Undersea Universities).
Regardless, Harvard’s is the only published information I’ve seen on any college giving specific detail on the rubric the admissions readers use to evaluate LORs.
Whether, and to what extent, other institutions use rubrics similar to Harvard’s is certainly open to debate, but the practical imperative of needing to reduce a LOR to a numerical ranking so that thousands of students can be sorted suggests that many, if not most institutions would need to use a similar rubric.
Whether we should believe that the rubric is based on “level of support” as at Harvard, or “extent to which writer provides details to support the adjectives used,” as you suggest - I think stands on the question of whether the schools are looking to rank the students, or the letter writers abilities. Harvard’s rubric, as simplistic as it may seem, does distill down to how strong (or weak) the LOR writer’s endorsement of the student is. Gauging the quality of fact based writing gets further away from the student and tilts more towards evaluating the writer.