
The Problem with Letters of Recommendation - diodorus
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-problem-with-letters-of-recommendation-agnes-callard/
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jacobobryant
You can always take the Benjamin Franklin approach:

"Sir

The Bearer of this who is going to America, presses me to give him a Letter of
Recommendation, tho’ I know nothing of him, not even his Name. This may seem
extraordinary, but I assure you it is not uncommon here. Sometimes indeed one
unknown Person brings me another equally unknown, to recommend him; and
sometimes they recommend one another! As to this Gentleman, I must refer you
to himself for his Character and Merits, with which he is certainly better
acquainted than I can possibly be; I recommend him however to those Civilities
which every Stranger, of whom one knows no Harm, has a Right to, and I request
you will do him all the good Offices and show him all the Favour that on
further Acquaintance you shall find him to deserve. I have the honour to be,
&c."

[https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-03...](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0365)

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stakhanov
A piece of advice I would give to students: If you're applying to N
universities, have your professors write recommendation letters to accompany
applications to N+1 universities (including a university that you're lying
about wanting to apply to). Chances are, you'll get N+1 copies of the same
letter in sealed envelopes. Open one. If you dislike what they write about
you, throw them all in the trash and ask another professor.

Why do I recommend such an unethical course of behaviour? Because some
professors are just nice people who want nice things for their students and
who will write nice things in letters of recommendations. And some professors
will have a character deficiency that will make them feel better about
themselves by writing mean things about other people. ...in each case, the
"personality test" around the professor has nothing to do with you, so why
should you suffer the consequences if you misjudged someone's character.

~~~
citizenkeen
I have never and would never give a letter of recommendation directly to the
person I'm writing it on behalf of.

I've attended four universities, and all of them had the letters of
recommendation addressed directly to them - I never got a copy of the letter.

~~~
stakhanov
Really? I've always had them handed to me. If a professor refuses to hand you
the sealed envelope, maybe that's the red flag right there. Even so: There's
probably a way to game that system, too. (Handing them pre-addressed
envelopes, and one of the addresses is a PO Box you own?) ...although you have
to be careful, because at some point it presumably becomes mail fraud.

~~~
BeetleB
> If a professor refuses to hand you the sealed envelope, maybe that's the red
> flag right there.

As a professor, it would be a red flag to me if a student insisted on my
handing it to him/her.

~~~
stakhanov
...you have to be aware that this business with the sealed envelopes and stuff
that exists in the anglo-american cultural sphere is not practiced throughout
the world.

One day, I asked my prof for a letter of recommendation when applying to a
scholarship by an Austrian funding agency which asked for the recommendation
to be written in cleartext, readable by anyone handling the application form,
including the actual applicant. I had explained this to her, but I guess that
by the time she got home she had already forgotten.

She handed me the letter of recommendation in a sealed envelope. I opened it
to transfer the text into the form. When I saw the way she was writing, A LOT
of things started to become clear to me with regard to past application
processes that carried letters of recommendation from her. She wasn't trying
to be mean or anything, but it was just so obvious that she regarded this as a
tedious duty. She didn't put the slightest bit of effort into trying to
remember any of the achievements of mine that she had been witness to and
could have mentioned, and was being exceedingly British in the way she was
tempering her style, and basically only mentioned things that were objectively
provably true (so that I was mentioning them elsewhere myself anyway without
any questions around credibility if they were coming from me). When a letter
of recommendation tries to say something negative, it will mostly say it by
way of omission, and the omissions in her writing were huge and gaping.

So, let me try to rephrase my initial premise in a less unethical way: If I
were a Professor, I would make a point of showing the recommendation letter to
the student, and go "This is the letter I'm going to write, let me know if you
want me to submit it."

In some places there will just be an esprit de corps mentality: People handing
positive recommendations to each other whenever requested, unconditionally,
and everybody benefits. -- It's just a competition where any cluster of
persons with low ethics end up creating an advantage for themselves. So, game
theoretically, the only rational course of action is to throw overboard all
considerations of ethics.

In that sense, I like the Austrian system a lot better because it doesn't
create the pretense that the letter of recommendation is not the result of
careful selection, when the Ango-American system creates the pretense of
ruling out selection when this can actually not be guaranteed.

The whole thing also carries a very negative flavour with me for another
reason: It always conjures up in my mind a picture of victorian-age London and
its caste system. I imagine some rich families employing domestic servants.
And I imagine some poor people who have to work as servants. The system
entailed that when a servant wanted to leave the service of one family and go
to work for another, then the new employer would ask for a letter of
recommendation from the previous employer. The idea was that if a person was
caught stealing or anything, then a letter saying that this person is a thief
would follow that person around and make them unemployable. It is easy to
imagine how this serves to cement the caste system and prevent social
mobility.

I can't think of a single one of my fellow PhD students who didn't have a very
complicated relationship with their supervisor, and I think it's a pretty
horrible system if the deficiencies in your relationship with your previous
employer follow you around to your next. -- It's actually one of the reasons
why I dropped out of academia.

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BeetleB
I'm not sure why you wrote all this in response to my comment. I think you
meant to address it to someone who is in favor of letters of recommendation.

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murgindrag
I really, truly, deeply dislike this author. This is the sort of thing which
sometimes happens to academics -- in a position of absolute power over their
students, divorced from any sort of checks-and-balances by tenure -- they
become mean people. Over time, that leads to mean cultures, with increasingly
abusive advisor-advisee relationships across entire fields.

This is most common in fields where a Ph.D is required to do meaningful work
(e.g. biology, philosophy, etc.). It is especially common in the humanities,
where many (most?) suffer from imposter syndrome (in many cases, rightfully)
so this gets tied up in ego issues too.

On the receiving end of recommendation letters, I can say two things:

1) They're almost meaningless. Most are glowing. 2) They reflect more on the
writer than on the student.

That's something students don't (and based on information they have, can't)
realize. If they pick the wrong professor to impress -- someone like Agnes
here who applies a philosophy of "hyper-rationalism" to recommendation letters
-- their career is shot.

For the most part:

* If you're applying somewhere, I recommend talking to many recommenders. Ask whether they can and will write a strong recommendation. If so, engage with them. If they don't answer, don't take a recommendation

* If you're looking for a professor for graduate school, talk to their students first. Look over where they are now. A state school with a good advisor will beat an ivy league with a bad one, hands down.

* If you're looking for an undergraduate projects, do the same. The stakes aren't as high, but you'll do a lot better if you chance on someone who cares about you as an individual and works to make you successful (which is their job, as a professor) rather than someone who places their career first (which is the reality, of most professors).

If you want to take a hyper-rational approach to it, think of it this way: if
better students students pick ethical, humane professors, you're giving
ethical, humane professors an edge in the academic rat race. And you're giving
sadistic bastards a disadvantage in the rat race. You're making the academy a
better place.

~~~
empath75
I think you’ve completely misread her. She is saying that she doesn’t know
what her students are capable of or what they can do, so she doesn’t tell them
her honest opinion — she merely writes the recommendation letter based on what
she knows objectively about the student. If she were to be honest, she’d
probably direct some students away from life decisions that they’d have been
successful and happy with if they had taken her misguided advice.

~~~
habnds
I've always been disappointed by people's consistent refusal to voice opinions
about my "career" decisions.

I'm perfectly comfortable dismissing feedback and advice when I feel that is
the best course of action. I want other opinions.

It's very difficult to get anyone to give feedback in a meaningful way or
opinionated career advice about what I might be well suited to.

This was particularly true of college professors.

Helpful sentences would start with "I think you would be good at..." or "While
you might be able to improve, I think you should steer away from ..."

~~~
jameshart
Agreed - particularly in my early career I wished more experienced folks would
tell me what potential they actually saw in me, rather than constantly being
asked what _I_ wanted to do.

In particular, this kind of withholding of advice disadvantages people who are
first generation college students, from the wrong social background, or lack
access to networks. People who don’t know what their options even are, let
alone which of those options is suited to them. Denying those people advice is
especially cruel.

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wodenokoto
I have been asked to write all my letters of recommendation myself, and the
professor/employer will simply make changes and print it on university/company
letterhead.

I know what details are important to highlight in the letter, and have always
been met with the logic that "therefore it only makes sense for you to write
it".

~~~
WomanCanCode
This is the best kind of recommendation letter. Who knows you more but
yourself?

~~~
neltnerb
Even if I'm super happy with someone's performance, a bullet list of the
achievements they want to highlight is extremely useful. Heck, _I_ have a hard
time remembering exactly what I accomplished in the last year, it's super
risky to assume your recommender will remember for you or happen to mention
what you think is important.

It's like... I keep a bullet list of things I've accomplished at work and add
to it when I feel like I did something worth highlighting as especially
helpful. Then during my performance review I've got more in active memory than
to discuss what I did last week.

Plus your recommender won't know the _context_ of how you're pitching your
application. They don't know the other recommenders you picked or what story
you want to tell, even if they have the luxury of enough free time to write
something personal.

As a recommender, the one that I find most obnoxious is that they usually ask
you to "rate people relative to others you've worked with" which is just a
ridiculous question. I'm at MIT, if I find someone seems to me like they'd fit
in as a first or second year grad student at MIT but maybe in the lower half,
do you actually want me to write down that they're below average?

It's pretty clear that it is not the question you intended to ask when you
don't bother to even ask me what kinds of people I've worked with before. You
can't ask people to numerically rank performance when there's never been an
agreement on the scale! And knowing that you're likely using it as a first
pass filter makes it even worse; what, are you going to somehow correct for
the difference between the people I've worked with versus everyone else
according to some magic objective scale?

Even if you know that I'm comparing to MIT students, do you realize MIT has
10000+ students with skill levels all over the map? Do you know that I value
practical skills more than most because I've seen what makes someone
successful in lab? It's just a part of the recommendation letters I wish
they'd just leave out. Filter based on GREs or something else that while
equally pointless is at least uniform and then just read the letter and think
what you want. Don't ask me to do half the thinking so that you can do none.

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Arkdy
I've been thinking about this from the perspective of the teachers who can be
asked to write dozens of letters a year.

After some interviews, my hypothesis was that having students be more involved
would lead to more engaged teachers and better letters.

So I started with this (
[https://tinyrecommendations.com/](https://tinyrecommendations.com/) )
interactive blog post which walks you through the steps of requesting a letter
(and even generates an example email to get you started).

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gww
I always enjoyed one of my friends grad-school supervisors approach to letters
of recommendation:

"Such and such was adequate for my lab therefore they would be more than
adequate for your lab."

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BrandoElFollito
I was once asked by a US company for "recommendations", that is people they
would call to ask about me.

I am French and it is illegal to call you previous employers, so I guess this
was the best they could get.

I was genuinly interested in that thing because the idea of such
recommendations is so unbelievable to me that I must be missing something.

How can a company expect to receive anything else than close friends who will
describe some kind of crossover between a genious and a saint? With, of
course, some weaknesses such as the tendency to be too good at his work?

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downerending
As far as I can tell, these letters are just a mark that a candidate has
enough social hygiene to be able to find a few people to say nice things about
them. (Or perhaps are psychopaths.)

This system is utterly broken and useless. My response is to write glowing
recommendations for _anyone_ that asks me.

~~~
waste_monk
>My response is to write glowing recommendations for anyone that asks me.

I find this to be very unethical.

LoR's should be an honest accounting of the merits, flaws, and accomplishments
of the subject - writing a strongly positive LoR for a subpar student harms
the community by subverting meritocratic admissions, may harm the subject by
placing them into a position they are unsuited for, and can possibly harm
other, more qualified students by having the subpar one occupy a slot in a
place-limited program that would otherwise be filled by a "better" student.

It may also harm your own career and students - if you get a reputation as
someone who always gives out good recommendations even to subpar students,
then it may reflect poorly on you. More importantly, it may harm your students
- if you're known for giving good LoRs to mediocre students then it becomes
impossible for you to give a good LoR to good students and have them taken
seriously.

I urge you to reconsider this practice.

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downerending
That's a reasonable position. But I've seen too many cases of people being
left behind in the reference game due to simply being unusual in some way:
shy/awkward, wrong demographics, uneven career, etc.

I believe in redemption and in judging people where they're at right now. If
they can demonstrate their current skills and accomplishments, lack of refs
shouldn't hold them back.

As for reputation, that ship has sailed. My refs aren't worth much, but for
someone who just needs the box checked, I'm happy to do it.

(Most of my refs are for industry, if that makes you feel any better.)

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Bostonian
Why don't schools scan letters or request them in electronic format and use
NLP to see if letters complement grades and test scores in predicting future
grades and graduation rates?

~~~
impendia
University professors (I am one), at least in my discipline (math), tend to be
diehard traditionalists. For better or worse, we tend to distrust _any_ formal
assessment mechanism.

