Odds are this article will either expose you, offend you, or depress you.
And that’s because our sacred tradition of recommendation letters–one that we’ve all participated in on some level–is pretty bogus. At best, letters of recommendation are a (mostly) harmless formality, and at worst, they’re a total sham.
Don’t believe me? Well, let me explain how the evolution of recommendation letters over the years has actually nullified their original intent and purpose.
Quick Disclaimer: I’m not trying to point blame or bring shame to those who have exploited the loopholes in the system. Instead, I want to bring light to the problems in the system and analyze why and how things needs to change.
In theory, the students, applicants, or candidates requesting the letters of recommendation would never be able to see the contents of the letters.
This would ensure that the recommenders feel no social pressure or obligation to write a wholly positive letter, leaving room for some objectivity and transparency.
But in many cases, there is no anonymity at all.
Many candidates are given the chance to view the letters after the application process, and recommenders are aware of this option.
One prime example is the fact that many applications (i.e. AMCAS) use the platform Interfolio, where candidates collect their letters into a “dossier” before submitting them to all their medical schools in the AMCAS. But there’s a catch: the candidates can send their letters to any email address they want (including their own), and the AMCAS and medical schools have no way of tracing that. This means that candidates can screen the content of their letters before deciding which ones to actually submit.
It’s also becoming increasingly common for candidates to play a direct role in crafting the actual content of the letters. This obviously negates the entire point.
OK - you might say - but it’s not like EVERYONE cheats the system, right?
Even if it’s only one person, the integrity of the whole system is undermined. And trust me–it’s far more people than you think.
Imagine you’re a candidate applying for a job or acceptance into a university or graduate school. If you had the chance to influence your letters of recommendation, wouldn’t you jump at that opportunity?
Of course you would, especially since you know that a good chunk of the competition will be doing the same thing. Why would you want to be at a disadvantage?
Generally, when this type of forgery happens, it results from the following pattern:
Even if candidates don’t write the letters themselves, they will often send a long list of qualities, stories, and examples that the recommenders can include in the letters.
So, again, the whole purpose of the letters is compromised.
Even before it was this easy or this commonplace to fudge the recommendation letter process, there has always been another glaring problem: the recommendation letters have never been equitable or holistic.
Since letters of recommendation hinge on one’s ability to network, the traditional recommendation letter process gives a natural advantage to:
And that’s just the equity problem. Another issue is that letters of recommendation aren’t holistic, very rarely giving a full picture of the candidate.
How useful is a recommendation letter if it only isolates and elaborates on the 2-3 best qualities of the candidate without discussing weaknesses, potential areas of improvement, or past failures/mistakes?
When you’re hiring someone for a job, giving them a seat in your incoming class, or even choosing a romantic partner, I would argue that it’s just as important (if not more important) to understand the negatives alongside the positives.
Beyond the problem of only focusing on the positive, most letters are incredibly narrow in their scope, only displaying the qualities of the candidate from a small sample size of interactions (i.e. 1-2 classes with a professor, a handful of shadowing sessions, one summer internship, etc). Going back to the romantic partner analogy, this is the equivalent of marrying someone based on a few dates.
I understand that some of these issues are unavoidable within the current system, but perhaps that the whole point–the system is inherently flawed.
The way I see it, we only have a few options when trying to revise this system:
This seems highly unlikely, especially for careers like medicine, where many believe it’s crucial to have some endorsement from physicians or other healthcare professionals. But I could envision the application process working without letters, perhaps through more rigorous interviewing and screening.
One idea would be making recommenders fill out evaluations in real-time while being recorded by a webcam (much like pre-meds taking the PREview or CASPer test). This would avoid the problem of forgery, but it would likely be met with pushback from the recommenders themselves as being inconvenient.
One idea would be to have candidates list a larger set of recommenders, and then have programs randomly select which recommenders to contact. But this seems prohibitive and inequitable for certain candidates (as based on Problem #3 in the previous section above).
This seems nice in theory, but it sounds like a liability that would cause legal headaches.
It’d be great if programs and centralized applications could offer these services to recommenders who aren’t native English speakers or writers. But obviously cost and time could be prohibitive here.
The moral of the story is that it’s more difficult to take the high road, and often the most ethical candidates will put themselves at a disadvantage compared to their peers who may be directly involved in composing their own letters.
However, if you’re trying to achieve the best of both worlds (as you should be) as an ethical candidate who obtains stellar letters, here are some bits of advice to follow:
What do you think about letters of recommendation? Am I exaggerating the problem, or am I underplaying it? How else could we solve the problem?
Let me know in the comments below!
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