A particularly good article about letters of recommendation from a student’s point of view can be found online. (“Getting Great Letters of Recommendation,” by Richard M. Reis)
Writing a letter for a good student is, for most faculty, not difficult. What is difficult is dealing with students who may not warrant a strong letter. The following exchange on UC Berkeley’s “teach-net” maillist provides a wide variety of responses to the problem of how and what to tell a student for whom you can’t write a strong letter.
The following query was posted on the mailllist:
I've received a request from a student who asked for a "strong" letter of rec. He was fine in class, I guess. Didn't participate much. A bit of a pest about his papers. All I can say in good conscience is that he worked and improved. I remember that on the first day of class he asked if I was a hard grader. I can't say ANY of the things I usually say: engaging, helpful, stimulating, hardworking, thoughtful, etc.
I could tell him some version of the truth, and say I can't write a letter. I could go ahead and write a weakly positive letter—it would go via email directly to the agency that has requested it. I could take the weasel way out and tell him—in partial truth—that I can't generate a letter in the two weeks he has given me as the deadline.
Help?
Responses:
I usually stick with the truth; then I don't have to worry about remembering what I have said. If I cannot write a good letter, I frankly say I am sorry that you do not meet the standards I have for writing letters. They have always accepted that.
I have always been frank with students who I feel I cannot speak strongly of - it seems to me that this is part of academe, part of life. I tell them honestly and as gently as possible that they would not get an ideal letter from me - so when he asked for a strong letter, he opened the door to the truth. Tell him you cannot write him such a letter, and encourage him to find folks that can. Suggest people he may not have considered (ministers, etc.) and wish him luck...
I think it's absolutely ok to say that you cannot write a strong letter and that the student would be better off asking someone else. If you are pressed for an explanation, you can give him more details. Why waste your time on a weak letter? If you choose to "weasel" out of it, I certainly wouldn't hold it against you. Sometimes these issues are such a drain of energy, it's best to dispense with them in the way that is best for you.
I would indeed tell him that you cannot write a particularly strong letter, but only represent the truth without inflation. If he is interested you write such a letter; if so, you will go ahead; if not, you won't write.
My own practice, for what it's worth, has been to write all such letters when requested. If weakly-positive is appropriate, that's what it should be. For all we know that's the best he's going to get from anyone. Hope this helps.
I think you should ask him what particularly he sees you as saying. I encourage each student to put together their ideas about who writes letters for them in terms of what the recipient wants/needs to know/hear and who can say it. If he does not have a particular drum for you to beat, then you can sneak in with a bland kind of positive but distant (rather than verging on negative) letter. But if he wants you to say X or Z and you cant, then you have to say so.
at that point, I would also take the lead and say, I am really not the best one to do that so he doesn’t have to figure out what you are trying to say.
I always find it best to be diplomatically honest with the student. It's not in their best interest to write a letter for them if you aren't really enthusiastic about them (they'll probably be able to find someone who is). It's also not fair to the agency they're applying to to write a positive letter (even a weak one) if you're not really enthusiastic about them. Putting this into words for the student is the hard part, but I just try to make them aware that I have their best interest in mind.
If he persists in asking you to write a letter then you can tell him that you're willing to write a letter but that it will not be the strong letter that you might be able to write were circumstances different. If he's OK with that then at least you have been honest and know that the letter you write will also be honest...and that sometimes makes the writing easier.
I would just tell him that you can't write a very strong letter. If he still wants it then he has been forewarned. I once told a student I could only write a letter not recommending him for study abroad because he got an F on the first exam and missed discussions, etc. My class may have been the exception for him. I don't think he believed me but that is what I wrote. It turns out the study abroad program still accepted him. I think if the student has several letters and yours is the weaker one it will do them no harm.
I am sitting and reading about 1200 letters of admission this week. All the fluff you mention is worthless. What is truly helpful is: He was number 4 in a class of 40. Then you look at the subject GRE, and if it is 50 percentile you know that you are dealing with a weak school. If it is 90 percentile you know that the letter come from Harvard, Princeton, Chicago. I think that it is our duty to write for people if they need it, very often the student don’t want to ask us, but he/she needs 3 letters. Now of course you are in humanities and cannot distinguish the good students from the poor, so you would have a hard time ranking students. We simply go by performance on tests.
It seems to me that truth here is the best policy. The real truth, that is: first, that you try to make letters as strong or weak as the student warrants, and won't strengthen them on demand; second, that for him you can only in good conscience write a weakly positive letter (although perhaps you might find a more diplomatic description, like "generally positive").
This doesn't sound too hard, maybe I'm missing something: "I'm sorry I can't write you a strong letter, why not ask some other instructors and see if one of them can?" This student deserves an honest answer: a letter reflects your performance, and your performance in my course was mediocre.
I tell students the following:
I only write confidential letters unless there's no provision for waiving access, because the other kind are ignored. If I can't write a strong letter I will tell you first. You need to provide the relevant forms and instructions with deadlines, an unofficial transcript so I can see what you've been up to, your statement of purpose or the equivalent for this application, and a CV. I'd like at least a week, and if I don't email you to tell you I sent it, be sure to nag me until I do!
I used to agonize about the situation to no avail. Now, I just tell them the blunt truth. I tell them what I'll put in the letter and ask if they want that letter.
My approach would be to write the letter and, as Howard Cosell would put it, "Tell it like it is." Anything else would be disingenuous.
I am very heartened to see the issue of recommendation letters discussed on teach-net. This is the first time I have felt compelled to share my thoughts on this forum.
I write about 60-70 rec letters each year mostly for medical school and PhD applicants. Many at UC Berkeley (especially in science classes) are asking me because they feel like I am the only faculty that knows who they are. I feel obligated to provide letters to my advisees or students that received an "A" in my class. I try to be honest about what I am going to say and I usually spend some time discussing with them what I know about them and how I will present my impression. But being honest is not always easy. For the top students who I have interacted with a great deal I am the obvious reference but I would say that is only 50% of the letters I write.
I have suggested to many of the "B" or "C" students that they would probably be better off asking a professor in who's class they received an "A" or who knows them better. I also say this to "A" students who I have never spoken to before they come to ask me for a letter. However, many still ask for a letter from me and feel that I am their last resort. In some cases they were turned down by other faculty (who told them they did not know them well enough to write a letter). In some of these cases I am brutally honest and tell them my letter will be "less strong" or "less personal" than others I have written.
One interesting facet of this for me is how many students come to office hours just so they will be able to ask for a letter later. For some of them they go to great lengths to get to know me and want to chat. Sometimes I even tell them "Don't worry, no need to "brown-nose". I would be happy to write you a letter. "
I rarely encounter a student who directly asks "Can you write me a strong letter?" but when I do, those coincidentally are the ones I am usually less enthusiastic about writing. I think more accurately I feel ambivalence towards the future success of some of these students when they don't strike me as excited about science or medicine but motivated by other factors. In those letters I may even say "John Doe is very motivated to do well in medical school".
I think the issue of recommendation letters for graduate programs is a neglected topic. We all expect our PhD applicants to have them but few faculty relish writing them. As some other comments have been put forth in response to Steve's letter, there are many issues about recommendation letters.
Are the letters perfunctory in some cases?
Do we only provide letters to our best students/the ones we know well?
Do we have an obligation to write them for certain students?
Are the issues different in various departments on campus?
What if any are the university policies on recommendation letters?
Maybe this is a topic for a Colloquium but 1 hour is hardly enough time to discuss all this.
I write letters for many premeds and frequently get requests from students that I don't know, students in some cases who have never been to office hours and have never asked a question in class. I simply tell them that I have a standard letter that I write for people in their situation. It says that they took the class, that it was a challenging class taken by talented students, many of whom are premed or pregrad school. It then says that in this setting the student earned a grade of _ and ranked __ in a class of about 200.
If the student has done well in class, I tell them that this letter won't hurt their chances much but it also won't help nearly as much as a letter from someone who knows them better and can write a more personal, detailed letter. If the student has not gotten a high grade, I strongly encourage them to find someone else. However, if, knowing the type of letter I will provide, they still want me to write it, then I do. I don't respond to requests for strong letters. I just tell them the type of letter I can write; take it or leave it.
I always say yes when a student asks for a letter. I don't worry about misleading the student because the two of us write the letter together. We sit in my office hammering it out. I ask the student what his or her strengths are as shown in my class. And I ask for examples, if I cannot come up with them. This inevitably produces a more convincing (and accurate) letter than I could have written without the student's help. And there are the additional benefits that it is no mystery what the letter contains and that the student knows I have tried to write the strongest possible accurate letter. As one of the above correspondents says, a poor student simply gets a weaker letter: There is less to say. If the student doesn't like the result of our joint effort, he or she is free to not use it.
It's a real problem on this campus that many graduating seniors are forced to seek letters of recommendation from professors who don't know them very well. If we had more resources, we'd teach smaller classes and the problem might go away.
When I teach large courses, I stand up on the first day and tell the students that it's in their interest to come around and talk to me—even if it's only because a significant fraction of them are going to be asking for letters long after the course is over.