To anyone who has had experience with grad school admission letters of recommendation (either as an applicant, recommender, or admissions committee member):
Grad school application deadlines are just around the corner for me, and while I feel confident about getting my own materials in by the deadline, I’ve recently become increasingly apprehensive about whether all of my letters of recommendation will be in on time. I can only pester my professors about it so much, and I now have the impression that grad schools are not as strict about deadlines as they purport to be.
So I’m interested in hearing about any relevant experience that would shed light on the following two questions:
To what extent do professors respect the deadline given to them (assuming the letter is requested at least ~3 weeks in advance of deadline)?
To what extent are grad schools strict about not accepting letters after the posted deadline?
I’ve never heard any stories about a student not being admitted because their recommendations didn’t arrive in time, but always I assumed that was because professors respect the deadline rather than because grad schools are lenient about it…
Well, I was asked to write a letter of recommendation a month or two ago (from a student who had plagiarized in my class, but that’s a whole other issue) and I asked her if I could do it on-line (because she needed it to get here basically in 24 hours). She checked and told me it was fine, as long as I got a hard copy in the mail.
Before I mailed the hard copy, she wrote me to say that she’d been accepted–which makes me question how much they needed the hard copy they claimed they had.
I’m pretty conscientious about getting rec letters out, though, sometimes I’ve gotten swamped and I hadn’t heard that late letters don’t count.
I went to grad school and I worked as an undergraduate assistant to graduate admissions while an undergraduate.
It depends on the professor. Most will get them in on time and other simply won’t care. There are many cases of students who got rejected for a late file for something that wasn’t their fault. I knew all of mine personally and checked in with them from time to time. You should send a gentler reminder before the deadline if you don’t hear from them.
There usually is some leeway on this. Schools don’t usually just start deliberating the day after the deadline. It is a process and it takes a while. Letters of rec are usually late for some of the applicants and they expect that. Still, I wouldn’t chance it. It could hurt a marginal candidate.
I administrate a graduate degree program and also have students asking me to write letters for them. So I get to see many such letters, and send several myself. This is what I can tell you about my experiences with this:
Most academics know some of their peers can be impossible with deadlines and try not to hold it against the poor student asking for the letter.
We send out a letter to the applicant when their application is complete - so they know the don’t have to worry. You could ask the place you are sending your stuff to if your application is complete. If it is, you can rest easy.
If we are missing a letter (or transcript for that matter), we’ll tell the student. We try not to play “sucks to be you” with kids who sincerely want to be evaluated, we give them every chance to get everything in.
I do pay attention to deadlines when writing letters. But I know of some others in my department that take deadlines as suggestions rather than hard and fast rules.
It’s an art to read rec. letters for the meaning between the lines (because most people don’t want to write a bad letter). Generally, Europeans are much more reserved. An English prof. saying a students was “able to handle all his duties efficiently and with grace.” is like an American saying “this kid is Jesus in a lab coat.” Letters written by peole who aren’t particularly sold on the person they are recommending usually start (and sometimes end) with general job descriptions. [i.e. "Dr. Mediocre’s duties while in his internship were to see cases, interact with clients, and be on call every third night.] without saying much about HOW the person performed those duties. Anything that comes across as a little red flag (Sue sometimes misses the forest for the trees, as she pursues one option so doggedly she ignores others) should be read as huge flashing, clanging, red lights - every single time.
I needed 3 rec letters for most of my grad schools, and 4 for another. All of my professors had the letters in before the deadline, but I gave them a minimum of two months from when I asked to when it was due. (I don’t think they needed two months to write it, I just anticipated them being quite busy at the end of the semester.) One professor I asked to write a rec for me didn’t reply to two emails and one hand written note, so I took the hint and asked someone else. (Incidentally, I was one of his best students. I think he just really didn’t want the extra work.) Having asked so far in advance I was able to find a replacement rec for his.
Personally, I came from a not-so-great undergrad institution, with a good-but-not-stellar gpa (3.7). I’m convinced it was my recommendations that got me in to the very well respected program I’m in now.
I’m dealing with this myself right now. How common is it for the receiving school/ department to lose stuff and/or get behind in matching their big file-o-stuff with applications?
Two of my recommenders sent things in right away. The other one I just finished his course this semester, so I suppose he was waiting to see how he graded me before he wrote the recommendation. He is in the department I’m applying to for grad school, so if he’s recalcitrant, I suppose they’ll know his ways.
I am also wondering about transcripts. I need transcripts from Tulane, which is still in chaos from Katrina. One of the schools I applied to said they got those transcripts, the other one didn’t. I’d really rather not go back and bother them if it’s the school here that has everything in a big pile, or is messed up about maiden name/ married name.
From my own experiences, I’d ask the receiving school to double-check its files. I had a transcript sit there for a few weeks before anyone thought to check the “mismatch” basket. You’d think they’d use the SSN as an identifier since that never changes, but apparently not.