<p>Where this could potentially hurt students is at other schools. S’s supplemental rec is from a social sciences teacher who has S in three courses this year, but he only sends out two copies of his LOR. (Have no idea why, but there it is.) One of those is to Chicago. OTOH, he planned his LORs around what Chicago wanted – so he has one social science and one math – which is not the strategy he would have taken otherwise.</p>
<p>Not sure what, if anything, he may do now about getting another social sciences rec (which is where he really shines and what he plans to pursue).</p>
<p>That’s really lame. I only had one math teacher who would even consider writing a “good” recommendation, although I’m sure there’s a decent amount of calling me average indirectly in it. I could’ve gotten any non math/science teacher to write me one . Oh well, can’t do anything about it now.</p>
<p>wow, what a development. D’s best rec writer was a teacher not in either of the first two categories (foreign language teacher) and she was going to have to skip sending his rec to Chicago. Now I guess she will send 3. English teacher was just going to do the Chicago rec, not needed for the others, she’ll probably have it sent also a shame to have him do it for nothing</p>
<p>So this doesn’t affect us in a negative way but it seems the change was made too late in the game for this year. I wonder if recs will now play a less significant role?</p>
<p>This isn’t going to make anyone happy, but I hope someone there tracks the effect of relaxing the rule. Presumably they would be able to tell whether people who had unconstrained choice of recommenders were admitted more often than people who followed the old rules.</p>
<p>gotta get this word out to the travelling admissions reps. The rep who visited my D’s school this week gave the old info. When was this change made?</p>
. Oh well, can’t do anything about it now.</p>