I write around 30 recommendation letters a year. These are mostly for students applying to college, but increasingly I’m asked to write recs for competitive summer programs, private schools, scholarships, even internships. It’s a lot of work. I estimate that I spend around 100 hours a year on it
And it’s uncompensated work. Almost all of these hours come directly from my personal time, which colleges treat as a free resource. There is nothing to stop them from making me fill out one more form, complete one more ranking, respond to one more school-specific prompt. I often feel like collateral damage in the school admissions arms race.
Some teachers simply refuse to do it. I have come to empathize with that position, but ultimately these recommendations are important to my students, so I put in the time and effort, even though the process is frustrating.
What’s most frustrating is that I’m not sure all this effort makes any difference. Do letters of recommendation really matter in college applications? I find it hard to believe they do. Last year 30,000 students applied to MIT. Who reads those 60,000 letters of recommendation?
I’ve long assumed that these letters just get passed through some kind of sentiment analysis software, where a large language model produces a score, appends it to the student’s profile, and the admissions process grinds on, one automated step at a time. I even recently speculated that colleges were feeding my letters to LLMs without my consent. What’s to stop them?
So when I logged into Naviance, the now-universal portal for college admissions, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a new feature under the “Letters of Recommendation” tab: a compose-with-AI button.
But I was surprised. Isn’t this an admission that letters of recommendation aren’t that important? If colleges will accept an algorithmically-generated, averaged-out narrative as a substitute for whatever I might have said, how could they possibly value what have I say? Why shouldn’t I just click “Compose”, fill in a couple of blanks, and reclaim my time?
I guess there’s a part of me that still believes a good letter of recommendation can have an impact. Maybe that’s naïve, but if it’s true, then anything less than my full effort would put my students at a disadvantage. I respect them too much to do that, even if the process doesn’t respect me.
For now, I’ll hope that my carefully considered letters will give my students an edge in a world of AI-powered chatbots processing AI-generated recommendations. But I’ll be watching this AI-powered arms race closely.
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