Writing Teacher Recommendation Letters for Colleges and Universities

College admissions is akin to an enormous sorting process. Some of the data used to sort students is concrete and un-nuanced. An applicant’s curriculum, grades and standardized test scores fall into this category. But there are also parts of every application that are nuanced. The quality of these credentials require careful examination and often involve the discussion of a committee of application readers. These parts of the application include an applicant’s out-of-class activities, their essays and their recommendations.

In every college’s “sorting process” there are always a minority of candidates who are likely to be admitted simply on the raw power of their un-nuanced academic credentials. But for most colleges most of their admitted students come from a broad middle category of applicants who academically have very similar credentials. The majority of a college’s admission process is devoted to looking at this broad category of students and trying to make distinctions between applications based on the applicant’s activities, essays and recommendations.

For each of our students who is, at least, competitive for a college there is a moment in the future when a committee of people will meet in a room and try to discern what makes that student more deserving of an acceptance letter (or more deserving of a scholarship) than another student with similar academic credentials. Your recommendation letter is devoted to making that distinction clearer. If I had to sum up every college recommendation letter in a succinct way I’d say that the letter is a statement about “Why this student is worth your consideration” or “Why this student has promise”.

The other point I’d like to make is that college admissions is, at most colleges, a rushed process. Colleges actively try to recruit as many applicants as possible. And, if they do that work exceptionally well, they will end up with very little time to read and evaluate each individual application. When I was an admission officer at Brown University, for example, I was assigned to read between 35 and 40 undergraduate applications seven days a week between December 16 and the final week of March.

When you have an enormous load of applications to read every day you become very skilled at skimming letters of recommendation to find the nuggets of information that you most need in order to make a distinction between that applicant and others that are similar. Knowing this, my goal is to help all UWC CSC teachers write letters that can’t easily be skimmed. The goal is to help you write a letter that begins delivering useful content from the very beginning of the prose.

The first lesson of writing an effective recommendation follows easily from this point: your recommendation should only be one page in length.

In the rest of this handout I will share with you some DO’s and DON’Ts when it comes to writing effective recommendations. I will talk a little about words that are overused in recommendation letters and how that overuse affects the manner in which you should use those words. I will describe four broad “types” of students and advise you on how to write differently about each one. And, finally, I will share a format for recommendation letters that will help you effectively capture the applicant in a single page of prose.

DO’S AND DON’TS

There are definitely some best practices when it comes to writing college recommendation letters for applicants to U.S. colleges and universities. Below are some of the things you should DO in a letter of recommendation for a college applicant:

1. Whenever possible, DO limit your recommendation letter to a single page.

2. DO use superlatives, when appropriate, and DO compare the student to other students whom you have taught. If you are going to say something superlative or outstanding about the student, DO say it early on in your recommendation; certainly in the first or second paragraph.

3. DO use specific evidence to support your praise in an application. Remember that it is not enough to simply cite your evidence. Evidence also needs to be explained! If you say that “Sheila’s extraordinary insight was demonstrated by her Extended Essay on acid rain” remember that you also need to explain how that Extended Essay demonstrated extraordinary insight.

4. DO use specific vignettes to illustrate what it is that makes an applicant special or makes them stand out, especially if you have described the student in some sort of superlative way. Remember that if you are trying to convey that the applicant is unusual in some way then the vignette that you tell should capture the student demonstrating that unusual quality. If the vignette sounds like an ordinary event then it likely won’t communicate an unusual quality.

5. If you feel challenged by the task of explaining what makes the student so special, DO say something to this effect in your letter

In writing an excellent recommendation you want to avoid giving your reader an excuse to begin skimming the text. As a consequence, here are some practices that you DON’T want to use:

1. If the recommendation form involves a check box matrix DON’T fill out the matrix. These check box systems are often included in recommendation forms as a failsafe against poorly written and/or unhelpful teacher recommendations. Since our students typically represent the top 5% of their class at their sending institutions, these check box matrixes also do not represent them adequately. You can either leave this section blank or simply write in: “See my letter of recommendation. These qualities will be covered, in depth, there.”

2. DON’T spend a large amount of time at the beginning of the letter describing how long you’ve known the student and in what contexts. While it is fine to say what class you taught the student in it is better to dispense with lots of background details and plunge, instead, right into the meat of the recommendation.

3. DON’T spend a great deal of time in your letter explaining the student’s extracurricular activities, unless you have something to add about one of these activities that is either relevant to your experience with the student or if it is something that the applicant themselves might not tell us. The admission officer is going to read about the student’s extracurricular activities in- depth in the “Activities” section of the application. Most of what you might write about the student’s out-of-class activities will, thus, be repeated elsewhere in the application.

4. DON’T explain what the United World Colleges are or how students are admitted to the UWC program. Do not feel as though you need to explain that the student is already part of an elite group because they have been admitted to the UWC Movement.

5. DON’T use a recommendation template for multiple students applying to the same school. If an admission officer sees that you’ve re-used the same text multiple times for different students they’ll likely ignore the entire letter.

6. DON’T explain your academic credentials or highlights from your professional résumé.

7. DON’T go into a lengthy exposition about what material is covered in the course in which you taught the student, unless doing so serves the express purpose of conveying something specific about the student.

8. DON’T make too many points. A good college recommendation should develop two or three points in depth rather than twenty or thirty points superficially.

9. DON’T assume that your target audience will understand acronyms or specialized terms that are unique to your school. If you make a point of saying how the student organized an “AALANA Conference”, remember to explain what “AALANA” stands for.

10. DON’T use adjective chains. For example: “Henrik is diligent, loyal, courteous, kind and smart.”

11. DON’T use language that suggests, in extreme terms, that the college-in-question should admit the student. For example: “Brown University would be making a gross error in not admitting Sarah.” or “Sarah is the sort of student who deserves to be admitted to an Ivy League college, period.”

OVERUSED WORDS AND PHRASES

As you write recommendations keep in mind that there are certain sorts of descriptive words and phrases that are used so often to describe applicants that they often do not pack much of a linguistic punch – especially for a reader who must read thousands of applications. Some of these words and phrases include:

Diligent

Punctual

Always completes her work

Hard-working

Arrives on time

Always prepared for class

Dedicated

Loves to learn

Driven

Detail-oriented

Responsible

Positive

Still waters run deep

Meticulous

Caring

Mature

Focused

Goal-oriented

Just because these words are often-used does not mean that you cannot necessarily use them when you write. But they are the sort of praise that is so often used that it can be hard to really differentiate a student from other applicants if the teacher’s argument is, for instance that the student is “very diligent, punctual and focused”. If you are going to use these descriptors for a student the praise will be greatly improved upon by using specific evidence or a specific vignette to illustrate how the applicant’s diligence, punctuality or focus are unusual.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT FOUR “TYPES” OF APPLICANTS

The academically superlative student

The most academically superlative students are often applying to colleges where they are competing against similar students with excellent academic credentials. For this reason it is of particular importance in these letters, to be able to articulate why the student is academically superlative. Is it the quality of their contributions to class discussion? Is it the sophistication of their outside reading? Is it the quality of their writing? Is it the nature of their insight? Is it something else?

Praising a student’s character is not entirely out-of-place in any recommendation for college. It is always important, on some level, to know that a student is kind, empathetic and/or socially capable. But these academically-superlative students are mainly being judged on what sets them apart from other students in the classroom setting. Consequently academic strengths should always be the main focus of these letters.

The academically strong student who has flashes of brilliance

The focus of your recommendation should still be on the applicant’s academic qualities, but in the place of overarching praise about the applicant’s brilliance you may want to focus on what you see as their emerging potential or on specific moments when the applicant impressed you. These are the applicants for whom great stories will have the most impact on their overall candidacy. If these students have other aspects of their application that seem especially noteworthy (an inspiring personal story or a significant extracurricular achievement) then an especially memorable story about a moment when they shown in class could be the tipping-point that gets them admitted.

The academically solid student who gets by on the basis of hard work and diligence

You need to spend at least a paragraph talking about the applicant’s work ethic and diligence – ideally with a supporting piece of evidence. But these are the cases when you may want to spend a good portion of your letter talking about other ways that the applicant has impressed you (in extracurriculars, community life, athletics or in terms of their character).

The student who has struggled academically

The admission officer who reads this student’s application is going to know, even before reading your recommendation, that the student has struggled academically. That information is going to be clear from the transcript. It is important in these recommendations NOT to pretend as though the applicant is a better student than he-or-she actually is. Instead you can be frank in your description of their struggle. But you should also talk about what you see as evidence that this student could develop academically over time. The kinds of evidence that suggest that a student might develop academically in the future include: their intellectual curiosity, their work ethic, their ability to seek out mentors, their strong interest and investigation into a specific academic area, or their family’s history of academic achievement. For these sorts of students it is also a good idea to talk about the positive aspects of their character.

HOW TO STRUCTURE A RECOMMENDATION LETTER WRITTEN FOR A COLLEGE APPLICANT

Paragraph 1

The first paragraph of your recommendation needs to do two things:

1. You need to provide a rationale for why the reader should care about this student. You could do this in a number of ways, but here are three possible approaches:

A. You could use a superlative saying (for example) “As an introduction let me simply say that Bobby McDougal is the best writer I have ever taught” or…

B …you could put the student into a larger context or…

C…you could take a humorous approach saying something like: “Bobby McDougal is what would be the result of putting the brain of Woody Allen into the body of Vin Diesel.”

2. You need to introduce the 2-3 points-of praise that you will develop in the next 2-3 paragraphs of the letter.

Paragraph 2 This paragraph opens with a single point-of praise and substantiates that praise with 1-2 specific examples.

Paragraph 3 This paragraph opens with a single point-of praise and substantiates that praise with 1-2 specific examples.

Paragraph 4 This paragraph opens with a single point-of praise and substantiates that praise with 1-2 specific examples.

If this student is quite strong academically or is applying to a very selective college (like an Ivy League school) then it will be better if all three points-of-praise are about the student’s academic ability or academic potential. If the student is not-so-strong or the college is less selective it would be OK for the third point-of-praise to address the student’s character, their role in the school community or in extracurricular activities.

Paragraph 5 This paragraph concludes the letter and may reiterate the three central points of praise one more time.

In total: The letter is a page in length – and no longer. If you need to monkey with margins and font size to fit everything on one page, do it.

IN CONCLUSION, REMEMBER THESE MOST IMPORTANT TIPS

1. Your recommendation letter should be a single page long.

2. It is better to describe 2-3 of the applicant’s best qualities in depth than it is to mention many qualities superficially. A strong recommendation will focus on the applicant’s best 2-3 qualities.

3. Praise, without substantiation, is like a ham sandwich without any ham in it. The evidence is the “meat” of the letter. If you say that an applicant possesses a specific quality or trait you need to be able to support that assertion with at least one substantive example.