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When should you ask for a recommendation letter? Many high schools answer this question for you with an official timeline and procedure for your rec letter requests. In addition to school policy, your teachers might also set rules around how and when to ask for letters of rec.

This guide will go over the most common recommendation letter guidelines, as well as some not so common ones that you hopefully won’t encounter (like a lottery system!). To start, let’s consider which guidelines are set on a school-wide basis and which ones fall into the realm of individual teachers.

Colleges ask for all different numbers of recommendation letters. Each college sets its own policy, so it's always a good idea to double check each school on your list to make sure you understand exactly what it wants.

Typically, colleges want you to send a recommendation letter from your counselor. Additionally, they may ask for one, two, or, in rare cases, three letters from your teachers. This guide will go over the different guidelines so you know how many recommendations to collect when applying to colleges. First, let's go over the different options.

Along with researching your colleges’ deadlines and requirements, you also need to figure out exactly what each one’s policy is toward recommendation letters. Some schools may ask for one or two letters, while others may actually prohibit them outright.

This guide is meant to help you locate the crucial information you need. First, we’ll go over the questions you need to ask. Then, we’ll take you through the process of searching for this info, step by step. To begin, what do you need to know?

Many colleges use a holistic process to evaluate applicants, seeking to understand the "whole person" and not solely rely on grades and test scores. One way they accomplish this is by reading recommendation letters from teachers and counselors.

This guide will discuss what exactly admissions officers are looking for in your recommendation letters, and why they’re so important to your overall candidacy. By understanding the purpose of rec letters, you’ll be in a better position to gather strong ones for your application.

To begin, let’s take a closer look at what admissions officers mean when they talk about using a holistic admissions process.

Sometimes the best way to learn about preparing your college application is to know how the process works on the other side. When admissions officers sit down to review hundreds, if not thousands of applications, what are they looking to learn about you? More specifically, what do they want to find out from your letters of recommendation?

This guide will explore how readers consider your recommendation letter for college admissions, along with how you can use that knowledge to your advantage. First, what are the requirements for letters of recommendation?

Since school counselors support students through all four years of high school, they can write some of the best, most personal letters of recommendations. At the same time, they have the added challenge of writing lots, often hundreds, of letters for all the college-bound students on their caseload. 

While almost all counselor references will comment positively on a student, there can still be bad ones that don't offer a whole lot to a student's college application. Let's look at examples that demonstrate the four most common reasons a recommendation letter is bad: it's impersonal and generic, it's repetitive, it gives no specific examples, or it expresses serious reservations about a student.

Recommendation letters are given serious consideration by admissions officers. Considering college admissions get more and more competitive each year, recommendations can go a long way toward helping you get accepted (or, gulp, rejected).

Most admissions committees seek a holistic view of the student. They want to know who you are, beyond the grades and test scores. A great recommendation letter both raves about your awesome qualities and opens a window into your personality and character.

By knowing exactly why some recommendation letters are more powerful than others, you can figure out who you need to ask and what you need to do to get one. So what exactly makes some letters of rec more impressive than others? Let's take a closer look at the features of great recommendation letters and examples of each one.

Generally speaking, no one is going to purposely hurt your college application and write a negative recommendation (that'd be an oxymoron). If for some reason someone feels like they can't honestly recommend you, they likely would decline or suggest someone else.

That being said, there can still be bad recommendations from writers with good intentions. And admissions officers can spot them from a mile away. These letters certainly don't help your application, and they could even hurt your chances of getting accepted. Let's take a closer look at what features make for a "bad" recommendation.

Are you applying to Harvard, or writing a letter of recommendation for someone who is? To get into Harvard or another Ivy League school, your letter of recommendation, like with all the other parts of your application, must be outstanding. Even if your grades, test scores, and other achievements are stellar, you don't want to downplay the importance of recommendation letters in the admissions decision.

Read on to find out just how important rec letters are to the Harvard admissions committee, along with how exactly they can provide powerful support for an applicant.

Not only is Dartmouth a very competitive school to get into, it also has an unusual requirement on its application: a letter of recommendation from a peer. This Dartmouth peer recommendation is in addition to two letters from teachers and one from a school counselor.

This guide dives a little deeper into what Dartmouth is looking for in a peer recommendation, and how you can get a great one that will impress admissions officers. First, how does Dartmouth describe this special reference letter? 

Scholarships are competitive. They represent an investment in you as a student and your commitment to pursuing your goals in college. Donors want to make sure you're putting their money where your mouth is, so to speak.

In order to earn a scholarship, applicants should give committees a clear sense of who they are, what their plans are, and how motivated they are to achieve them. Letters of recommendation for scholarships can go a long way toward testifying to a student's past achievements and potential for future success.

Let's take a more in depth look at what purpose recommendation letters serve in the scholarship application process.

As an English teacher and college counselor working with high school students, I've had the privilege and responsibility of writing letters of recommendation. Starting out, I had a strong urge to help, but no clear sense of what exactly should go into a reference letter. If they all speak to students' impressive qualities and accomplishments, what makes some letters stand out among the rest?

To answer this question, I researched recommendation letters from both sides of the college process, drawing on the advice of high school counselors and teachers and the perspective of college admissions officers. I also read dozens of recommendation letters, from the ones that admissions committees loved to the ones that were cast aside as mediocre, useless, or straight up negative about a student.

This article compiles the most important lessons I learned through this research and my own work supporting students through the college process. Read on for a discussion of what exactly needs to go into the kind of rec letter that effectively advocates for a student and boosts her admissions chances.

Choose your friends wisely, they say...because they might be getting you into college. Granted, that phrase probably didn't originate in the world of competitive college admissions, but it applies to Dartmouth and Davidson, both of which require peer recommendations along with the traditional teacher and counselor recs.

Your peers can (and are expected to) give a different perspective than your teachers and counselors. This guide will go over the exact requirements for peer evaluations, along with advice on who you can ask and how to ensure a strong peer recommendation for your college applications.

To start, which schools want a peer letter of rec, and what are they looking for?