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On institutions that demand individual uploads of letters of recommendation for undergraduates applying to grad school

Brian Leiter

A senior philosopher elsewhere writes:

It's the season to write graduate and professional school applications for undergraduates.  As always, the letter has to be uploaded separately for each institution applied to.  I just did this for a student who applied for 12 programs (probably about typical), and I spent more than an hour engaged in such enriching activities as  repeatedly typing in my address, and  repeatedly answering the "in what capacity have you known the applicant?" question. (Thank you — I'd never thought to address this question in a letter.). To add to the fun, the Harvard and Duke platforms crashed 3 times each, so I was able to engage in the joyous exercise 4 extra times. 

If one writes for multiple students a season, the tedium, of course, aggregates.  Surely there are better uses of faculty — or anyone's — labor.  And this labor is of course in addition to actual writing of the letter, which can, depending on circumstances, run to several hours a student. 

The "collegenet" platform is of little help, since one has to enter and upload individually for each institution.

Supporting students in developing their careers is, obviously, one of the most meaningful parts of our job.

Enduring hours of grating, and avoidable, tedium is not.

I recognize there are many much worse things wrong with the world.

But this particular life-turd, it seems to me, is easily flushed.

Could some of these well-heeled educational institutions pool their resources, and develop a universal platform enabling one upload per student, and stop neeedlessly squandering labor hours?

Law schools at least run a centralized process through the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), so one submits just one letter for the applicant to LSAC, which in turn distributes the materials to the schools.  (I am told medical schools use a similar approach.)  But PhD programs, and not just in philosophy, do tend to require that the letter be submitted through their individual portal, which is an idiotic waste of time.   Is there some analogue to LSAC for graduate programs that could do something similar (for a fee, of course)?  Any other ideas?

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23 responses to “On institutions that demand individual uploads of letters of recommendation for undergraduates applying to grad school”

  1. John Fischer

    Agreed totally!

    W.r.t. "enduring hours of grating… tedium," we might add: We already endure hours of grading tedium…

    Reply
  2. anon

    Interfolio!

    BL COMMENT: Graduate programs do not accept letters through Interfolio at present, I don't know why.

    Reply
  3. Mark Silcox

    My (battle-hardened) guess it that the individual grad programs aren't the villains here; it's the senior administrators of many institutions' Graduate Colleges, who want to design their own parochial submissions processes because they've told themselves they have a "vision" of "the ideal University of X" student.

    Still, surely this is practically the definition of a first-world problem.

    Reply
  4. Gregory Pence

    'tis even more annoying when professional schools (e.g., medical) require a recommender to create a username and password at the school before filling out their form and uploading a letter for the student.

    Reply
  5. Curtis Franks

    What we need is a platform with some AI that will comb through all this valuable data and pick out trends such as "22% of this years PhD applicants are the single greatest student taught by at least one of their professors," "the students at institution X have increased monotonically in excellence for 15 years, each of which has featured arguably the best student it has ever enrolled" and "Professor X's 'long standing policy of dissuading all students from applying to graduate school' has been shelved for exceptional cases at least twice a year for over a decade."

    Reply
  6. Sebastian Lutz

    AcademicJobsOnline (https://academicjobsonline.org) allows the applicant to choose which letters uploaded by the letter writers is accessible by which school. It is free for applicants. Their eDelivery Service, which approximates Interfolio's email service, is free for both schools and applicants (https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/membertypes).

    BL COMMENT: I don't know that this will help with students applying to graduate programs.

    Reply
  7. Fritz Allhoff

    At my MA program, many of our students apply to more than 12. And we're often writing for multiple students. In any given year, I might upload as many as 100 letters. It's really frustrating that this can't be integrated in some better way, but I reckon the main issue is that individual institutions really have no incentive to work together to figure this out–the loss of faculty time (including blog posts!) just doesn't count anywhere.

    I think the pressure would mostly have to come from graduate students themselves, to try to push for a migration to something like Interfiolo, or some other platforms that have been developed.

    Reply
  8. Gregory Pence

    An enterprising student needs to clone Interfolio for this purpose and one day he/she will be richer than any of us, as in, anyone heard of Slack?

    Reply
  9. David Y.

    In fact, at least in my discipline, a lot of the schools use the same system already, namely rec.applyyourself.com, but the system creates a distinct "storefront" for each school, and doesn't seem to link recommendations by the same recommender for different schools (much less different applicants). Since so many schools use the system already (check the links you receive from them), there's an obvious target for making this process easier. LSAC is the obvious model.

    Reply
  10. Kenny Easwaran

    CollegeNet at least has the advantage that I only had to go to one site, instead of *also* dealing with the tedium of finding each e-mail for each institution for each student when I had finished writing their letters. Sure, it probably only takes 10-15 seconds to find each individual e-mail, but again, that adds up. And it also runs the risk of me missing one of the recommendation requests if a student didn't provide me with a complete list of institutions they were applying to that I can search for in my inbox.

    Reply
  11. Applicant

    I am a current college senior applying to Ph.D. programs- Interfolio has worked for most, but not all, of the programs to which I have applied. Four programs (out of the twelve or so I am submitting) have required individual uploads, but Interfolio has worked for the rest. It’s been very convenient.

    Reply
  12. Gregory Pence

    For those who’ve never heard of Slack (which as just bought by Salesforce) or its founder:

    https://slack.com/about/leadership/stewart-butterfield

    “Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal,”

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/salesforce-buys-slack/

    Reply
  13. anon

    I'm sorry, but I could not help but get extremely annoyed by a senior professor complaining about the "hours" of work that go into submitting PhD applications.

    When I was applying to PhD programs in philosophy seven years ago, I needed to work in the kitchen at my friends' catering company to afford to pay for application fees. They paid a generous $100/day for an eight-hour shift. I can't say for certain, but with 12 applications, application fees averaging at about $100 per school (counting transcript fees, GRE-sending fees, etc.), I'd estimate that I put in about 96 hours of work in a kitchen just to pay to apply to grad schools… and get rejected many places.

    Now employed as a college instructor, I'm currently serving as a letter writer for an undergraduate student applying. Each of his applications takes me 15 minutes tops to complete.

    Can we ***please*** have some perspective when throwing around words sentences complaints like our "endurance" of "hours of grating, and avoidable, tedium?"

    Reply
  14. John Fischer

    Anon: I do get it. Senior academics have a cushy life, and we complain way too much. I would however distinguish between the many hours we put in to do necessary and even supererogatory things, like refereeing papers, writing letters for grad students and others on the job market, promotion and tenure letters, writing comments on papers, etc. It would be totally objectionable for us to complain about these sorts of things, which many of us do quite a lot of (and admittedly sometimes gripe about).

    What is frustrating, on the other hand, is *wasting* time doing stuff that could fairly easily be done so much more efficiently. Also, note that you are writing/uploading letters for one undergraduate, and each takes about fifteen minutes. Many (or at least some) people write letters for say 4 to 6 undergraduates each year. If they each apply to (what?) fifteen schools, and each letter takes about fifteen minutes to upload, it adds up–and people are pointing out, reasonably, that this could be set up more efficiently. Or so it seems to me.

    Reply
  15. Larry

    From what I’ve seen, Interfolio is shoddily coded and poorly supported.

    Reply
  16. anon

    Sure, your points are totally fair, John, and I do hope that your turd gets flushed. But hopefully you also see why the language of “endurance,” “tedium,” and that which is “grating” is offensive for a task that is a minor nuisance at worst, built into a world where the less privileged are subjected to far more difficult tasks.

    So yes, let’s flush the turd. But let’s also recognize this turd for what it is: a very minor inconvenience at worst. And let’s also think before we cry in our coffee about how victimized by the system we’ve been by having to spend “hours,” recognizing what kind of measurement an hour really is.

    Reply
  17. Sebastian Lutz

    Regarding AcademicJobsOnline: I should have added that part of that service is AcademicProgramsOnline (https://academicprogramsonline.org/ajo), which, "is part of [the] AcademicJobsOnline site specially designed for fellowships, awards, student admissions and programs such as REUs." (https://academicprogramsonline.org/ajo/intro).

    Reply
  18. OP

    RE extremely annoyed anon's plea for perspective, and Mark Silcox's quite accurate observation that this is a first-world problem:

    The OP acknowledged that there are "many much worse things wrong with the world."

    Nevertheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable for academics to devote some energy to improving academic life, even in relatively inconsequential respects. (Many academics, esp. senior ones, have put in considerable work on administrative service work that is is hardly more consequential than the present issue — and quite appropriately, given their job descriptions.)

    I'd have thought it was evident that the concern is not that the Letter Upload Crisis ranks somewhere between COVID and climate instability in the great scheme of very bad things; rather, as John Fischer says, it is an annoying, time-wasting, problem that seems pretty easy to fix — so why not spend a little bit of energy calling attention to it, and encouraging efforts to fix it?

    Reply
  19. John Fischer

    ERRATUM:

    Anon: I do get it. Senior academics have a cushy life, and we complain way too much. I would however distinguish between the many hours we put in to do necessary and even supererogatory things, like refereeing papers, writing letters for grad students and others on the job market, promotion and tenure letters, writing comments on papers, etc., and just wasting time doing things inefficiently.

    It would be totally objectionable for us to complain about the first sorts of things, which many of us do quite a lot of (and admittedly sometimes gripe about).

    What is frustrating, on the other hand, is *wasting* time doing stuff that could fairly easily be done so much more efficiently. Also, note that you are writing/uploading letters for one undergraduate, and each takes about fifteen minutes. Many (or at least some) people write letters for say 4 to 6 undergraduates each year. If they each apply to (what?) fifteen schools, and each letter takes about fifteen minutes to upload, it adds up–and people are pointing out, reasonably, that this could be set up more efficiently. Or so it seems to me.

    Reply
  20. John Fischer

    First, my original post was a bit garbled, so I posted an "erratum" below. Sorry.

    Second, I don't spend much time complaining. I do spend a lot of time supporting my and other graduate students, in whatever ways I possibly can.
    But to do this I have to be efficient, and thus I hate systems that require me to waste time; I'd rather be spending time on supporting graduate students and addressing the really difficult challenges of our profession in these difficult times.

    Reply
  21. anon

    In my experience applying to grad school (a few years outdated), you can usually get it to work (not always) by not telling the school that you're using interfolio but just using the fake interfolio email address associated with the letter instead of the letter writer's actual email address. I think this doesn't work if the system requires letter writers to answer questions about the applicant.

    Reply
  22. Ph.D. applicant

    As a current master's student applying to 13 programs, I might add that an integrated system might save time on both ends! I've spent much longer than I care to tally entering my addresses and prior institutions and my parents' occupations and the addresses and phone numbers and emails for my three references and so on.

    I might add that Rutgers and MIT are especially frustrating. The former won't let you send LOR requests until you submit a preliminary application, for which you need a completed statement of purpose. The latter asks applicants to email to their references a pre-written script that contains a link to the recommendation portal—-and even includes an explanation of their choice of this bizarre system. (Personally, I doubt that LOR requests get filtered out as spam; and I feel guilty enough about sending too much application-related email without having to send yet another message on the subject.)

    Reply
  23. Ph.D. applicant

    While we're on the subject of onerous and unnecessary components of doctoral applications… Most top programs require the GRE and an overwhelming majority of these require that applicants send official GRE scores straight from ETS. Conveniently for ETS, every time I order a score report I pay $27——even if, ultimately, I'm rejected from the school to which I send the report.

    Oxford, the standout example, allows applicants to upload an unofficial report, which I think should be the gold standard. Who's going to lie about these matters, knowing that the lie will come through if they're admitted and must share an official report?

    This is probably at the administrative rather than departmental level, so perhaps it's hard to change or there are economic interests at play of which I'm unaware.

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