I’ll be honest. I think letters of recommendation are a big waste of time. They require the applicant to find someone who is willing to contribute some of their personal time to write a letter of recommendation. The letter of recommendation will simply restate what is otherwise on the application. I remember having to badger my teachers for countless letters of recommendation for scholarships, etc, which I felt bad about because I knew they were busy with teaching duties.
When I applied to grad school (the first time) I was out of school a number of years, so I had to instead badger my coworkers and hoped they could write well. Managers at my corporation aren’t allowed to write them so I badgered people that I work with.
Now that I am applying to grad school eh second time, I found several colleges that don’t require them for the graduate program and am applying to those and choosing not to apply to the ones that require LoR because I feel bad about wasting people’s time.
For undergraduate admissions, LoRs do give a small amount of additional information to the college. However, they also add confounding information (such as how well the recommender writes LoRs; different recommenders may write differently quality LoRs for the same student). Such confounding information likely favors students at high schools where counselors and teachers are not overworked, and where they have experience and practice writing LoRs (i.e. not the high school where counselors are mostly busy with keeping students from dropping out and where most college-bound students go to community college or the nearby state university that does not need LoRs).
I have written LOR for grad school programs. I have also been contacted via email or telephone about some of these applicants. It was nice to be able to answer questions for their prospective programs…and provide additional detail.
I was on the admissions committee for Columbia’s architecture grad school. Letters of recommendation were extremely important in our decisions and they did not all just say the same platitudes. Most interesting were when one professor had to write letters for a half dozen of his students. He had clear favorites among them.
Our high school teachers considered writing recommendations part of their job and I think most went to a fair amount of trouble to write useful ones.
It’s not personal time–it’s part of the teacher’s job.
If the letter does just that, it’s a terrible, useless letter. If that’s our standard, then I, too, am against it. I know, though, that rec letters can do much more than that, thankfully.
When I taught high school, I took my rec letters very seriously and put a lot of time and thought into them, and I tried to provide personal insights and anecdotes from my own experience with the applicants in order to illustrate some qualities they possessed that aren’t displayed elsewhere in the app.
I don’t mind writing them. Like @thumper1, I prefer the one-on-one when there is a follow-up phone call – and I appreciate the interchange when I am the one calling to follow up on the letter. The letter can definitely add a dimension to an application, but it usually confirms an impression I have from the application itself as opposed to changing my initial take. I’m talking hiring rather than academics, so take this comment with a hefty grain of salt.
I don’t believe that any high school teacher job description includes writing letters of recommendation. I also don’t think teachers are provided time while at school to write them. I think they do them in the evening or during the weekends, which the rest of us consider personal time.
When I taught high school it was very explicitly part of my job and the school was very clear about it. I did them in the evening and on weekends, but as a school teacher, I did a lot of my work in those times–i had 50-60 essays to grade a week, after all, not to mention lesson planning, curriculum development, and other unavoidable work. @engineer4life
Quality of the recommender, as opposed to the student, may cloud the comparison. I.e. if two equally good students have LoRs that vary in quality due to differences in the recommenders, that is a difference that is can affect admission decisions even if it is not a difference between the students.
Ucb, I’d worry more about kids choosing odd writers, the coach or, say, 2 humanities, when they’re going after STEM. Adcoms know not all are great writers. And if you pick a teacher who’s a wingnut, that’s not the fault of the college, for asking for a view.
I absolutely think that LOR are not useless and can add dimension to the applicant’s package. One of D’s teachers accidentally sent a copy of her LOR home with her at the end of the year in a pile of papers last spring, and it gave some insights that one would simply not be able to discern from a transcript, essay and test scores. I don’t know if LOR were in the teachers’ job descriptions, but I know they took them very seriously.
I don’t think teachers consider evenings or weekend “personal time”. When do you think teachers grade assignments, or prepare their lesson plans? They certainly aren’t given enough time during the school day to complete those tasks.
Like many professionals, high school teachers are usually salaried employees who are expected to complete all sorts of tasks outside of regular school hours. Unlike some professionals, teachers are often underpaid for the value of the work they do. The tradeoff is that they get a long summer break.
While LORs do add to the applicant’s profile and are technically part of the teacher’s/Profs’s job, it should be said that the decision on whether to write one for the requesting is solely at his/her discretion. No student…or employee for that matter is entitled to an LOR with a particular instructor/supervisor.
If the instructor/supervisor doesn’t feel inclined to issue one for him/her*, the student/employee should seek out other instructors who know the student in more depth and/or could write a strong positive LOR in good conscience. And if s/he can’t find anyone, s/he may need to self-assess and to take some stock in asking him/herself what s/he may have done to have end up in a situation where no instructor/supervisor is willing to write one for him/her.
Also, LOR writers can and do reserve the right to take back promises to write strong positive LORs if they subsequently observe student behavior/actions which bring their prior positive impressions of his/her academic work or character/attributes into doubt. A good reason to maintain the positive impression not only with that particular Prof, but also with other Profs…especially within the same department.
An older undergrad classmate had two Profs from his Masters program rescind promised LORs after subsequently hearing about his negative classroom behavior from another Prof in the department.
Often because the LOR writer doesn't feel s/he knows the student's work and his/her attributes/character well enough to write one or feels the student's academic work/attributes/character aren't sufficient to merit writing a strong positive LOR in good conscience.
I don’t recommend openly advertising this attitude with any faculty or supervisors you may have as a graduate student or employee as many of them do see great value in LORs.
And this value is actually higher in some professions and at the graduate level…especially PhD. In fact, for the latter, LORs are just as/sometimes more important than one’s undergrad/Master’s GPA, Master’s/undergrad thesis if applicable, etc.
I work for a large corporation and writing letters of recommendation for employees who are applying to grad school is definitely part of my job.
OP- are you working now? I can’t imagine your boss or someone in a supervisory capacity would resent being asked. It takes 10 minutes. If someone refuses I would take that as a sign that they aren’t comfortable endorsing your overall trustworthiness/work ethic, etc. NOT that they are too busy to write a letter.
I just did an LOR and the university actually sent me a nicely done template- they didn’t want a letter so much as a “fill in the blanks” based on some prompts. It was super easy, and when done, I uploaded it into a confidential application file.
Yeah I’m working now but writing an employee letter of recommendation is something supervisors aren’t allowed to do, per written policy at my company. Additionally, if co-workers write letters of recommendation, they must be done on personal time (i.e, at home).
Since most of my coworkers are busy people with families, kids, and hobbies, and don’t work on things like this at home, but also can’t do it while on the job, it’s asking a lot of someone to write a letter of recommendation for me as an adult.
It was way less awkward when I was a student.
(And frankly, I’m not 100% confident I have the greatest reputation in my company. I do my best work each day and some people like me and some people don’t, and frankly, I don’t really want to spend any time trying to figure out who would write nice letters of recommendation and who would not. I suspect this is not a lot different than a lot of people today.)
Today as an adult, I just see an ethical issue with letters of recommendation. By asking a teacher to write a letter of recommendation, you are asking them to recommend you based on what they have seen and observed of you while you were sitting in their classroom. I consider public education to be a walled garden, in other words, what happens at school stays at school from the paid professional point of view. I don’t consider it ethical that someone in a supervisory position, who is paid to teach every student that walks in the classroom door, who issues grades and knows confidential information about many students, ethically can submit to a 3rd party details about their experience with the student.