If Stevie asked Professor 1 for a LoR, and the P1 said yeah, she was probably sure it was going to be a positive letter. I feel like it's a professor's responsibility to tell their students up front whether or not they will write a kind letter. As I'm applying right now to graduate schools, I feel very lucky that all the professors I asked seemed enthusiastic to write my letters.
As a former teacher, I would NEVER have told one of my students that I would write a college rec letter for them if I didn't know I could write a strongly positive one. You just say, "I'm sorry, I don't think I'm the correct teacher to do that for you."
@@larrybee7713 I feel like that's fairly obvious, the whole point of a letter of recommendation is to strengthen an application and help the student succeed. If you don't want to recommend the student, then don't, but trying to purposely try to sabotage their future is a dick move. A person trusted you, and you need to honor that
The positive tone is baked into the definition of an LoR. When I am writing a letter to RECOMMEND someone for a position, obviously my tone is going to be positive, and I think it’s completely reasonable to assume this to be the case.
I adore these! One public request- would Dean Z be able to include a few more non traditional applicants (a few years out of college) who are borderline candidates for review? I.e. a few more that include someone who may fall into waitlist or who is a splitter or under medians candidate? Thank you again for these! They shed such great light on a stressful and often opaque process.
Dean Z, since you seem to view that first letter as a strike against the professor, would you ever consider reaching out to the student to inform of them such a letter to give them a chance to pull them from future applications?
There are a variety of reasons why I can’t do that, but first and foremost, it’s just not the role I play in the process-I can’t be an advisor to individual applicants, and I don’t want to create that expectation.
Dean Z, can you do another reading but for an applicant that gets put on the waitlist? Can you also provide further detail about what would have gotten them off the waitlist and if they did ultimately end up getting accepted?
I loved this! For letters of recommendation, is it preferable to have letters from professors within the student's major/department, particularly for a STEM major? Or is it also fine to only have liberal arts professors from electives/seminars write these letters?
How does Dean Z feel about fonts? I always prefer Garamond, and I plan to have all application materials in it. Would this be a red flag? Is it better to go traditional with Times New Roman?
Would it have made sense to have Stevie write an additional note to Michigan Law explaining the possible discrepancy in the less-than-favorable LOR just to see if she took a defensive tone or not in her reply to Michigan?
You say the median is a 169, but is this based on last year or this year’s cycle? I’ve heard that LSAT scores are higher such that the top 20 schools across the board are expected to raise their medians.
Yes, 169 was last year’s median, and yes, we expect our median to be a smidgen higher this year-but we won’t know our median for sure until after students actually enroll, in late August. And to complicate matters-I am not at all sure that this coming year will be competitive in the way that this just-finished season was! So our target median may very well return to 169. It took until about mid- to late December in this past season to know how competitive things were going to be, and I expect not to know about this coming season until about the same time.
