JRA Educational Consulting Blog

Junior year is the ideal time to select the teachers who will write your letter(s) of recommendation for college. Your core academic teachers are usually the best recommenders because they are more likely to have taught you in a high-level course, perhaps know you for several years and can speak to your growth. A teacher’s recommendation carries weight in the college admissions process because the teacher can evaluate − relative to other students − your work, intellectual vitality, resourcefulness, collaborative spirit, and more.

Topics: College Admission, College Counseling, Letter of Recommendation

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In an April blog post titled Recommendation Letters In the Era of Covid-19, we noted that “LORs [letters of recommendation] were important in admission decisions even before the Coronavirus made in-person interviews problematic, and they’re likely to increase in importance now.” Nothing that we’ve learned since then has changed our minds about that…

…but there’s another dimension to recommenders and recommendations about which you might not be aware: whoever completes your Common App School Report (often conflated with the “counselor recommendation”) is going to be asked to rate you in terms of the following factors and in this manner:

Topics: College Admission, Common Application, College Counseling, Letter of Recommendation

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Now, with mandated social distancing in our lives for the foreseeable future, all schools, big and small, are faced with the very same issue. While Skype or Zoom-based interviews are likely to increase in popularity and number, it’s also certain that letters of recommendation (LORs) will grow in importance to admission officers when they evaluate applicants. On top of that, a number of colleges will be test-optional next year, so in the absence of SAT or ACT scores, emphasis on LORs, among other factors, will increase.

Topics: College Application, Letter of Recommendation, Going to College, Coronavirus

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It’s clear that for a limited set of colleges, the set that a student is likely to assemble as possible application targets, gathering needed information on letters of recommendation requirements isn’t onerous — colleges’ web sites and applications are almost certain to include that information — but it’s far less easy to obtain information on specifically from whom – what “recommenders” – letters of recommendation can come. This blog is going to discuss the one in its title: Do Colleges Accept Letters of Recommendation from 10^th Grade Teachers?

Topics: College Application, Letter of Recommendation

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What: A recommendation discloses things about student character beyond a student’s academic performance. It is not a recitation of information contained elsewhere in the application or school transcript.

Topics: College Admission, Letter of Recommendation

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