Letters of Recommendation is a category of MBA apps that is seeing a lot of shifting around. This post was first published in 2014. THINGS HAVE CHANGED and they continually change on this topic. Please check out our latest posts on recommendations here.
Oh, adcoms, adcoms. They try hard, but sometimes their best efforts just miss the mark. Case in point: This year’s new development with Letters of Recommendation. Here’s the deal: Now that the schools have reduced the number of essays that they require, it’s made it easier for Brave Supplicants to apply to more schools. Fewer…
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FPHAWK says
Does Essaysnark think that there is more collaboration going on at these schools? Do they collaborate on admit/deny decisions to protect their yield?
essaysnark says
Yes the adcoms talk with each other but not about admit decisions, as far as we know (might even be illegal to do that). We do know that certain applicants have been discussed after the fact, over cocktails at happy hour! But yield protection is not the reason why.
vasilescu says
What if a reccomender writes a bit more than the 300 words limit?
I mean, for us as applicants, word limits are pretty damn important, but what if a reccomender wants to cover a bit more (maybe because he/she too thinks that 300 words might be pretty darn few to cover what he wants to say and he/she doesn’t have time to do multiple revisions, compressions etc, as we do?)
How would a school see an answer of .. 500 words to a 300 words question?…
essaysnark says
Shouldn’t be a problem except that some schools’ recommender systems prevent too much text from being entered so we can’t say that it will always be fine due to those technical limits that may crop up. The adcoms are fine with recommenders going overlimit though, they should just be reasonable.
vasilescu says
Yeah, I forgat that the systems might have an automated limit to word input.. makes sense..
Thank you!
FPHAWK says
Pretty sure HBS allowed for a .docx or .pdf to be uploaded this year. No problem if recommender goes over.
essaysnark says
Yes, most schools allow uploads like that, but there’s always the outlier that causes problems.
kaplanmj says
I have seen it mentioned on another admissions consultants website that Darden and Yale also went to these standardized questions, but I can’t confirm that looking through Yale’s application or on their website.
essaysnark says
That would be a shame in both cases.