I really wasn’t saying it’s not fair but if it come off that way, my bad.
I definitely wasn’t whining either. A med student who was on their school’s admissions committee on here has said that weak letters hurt when everyone else has good/strong letters. My impression from that was that a weak letter is a letter that contains only bland praise with no anecdotes or examples to back it up as a negative/bad letter was rare. I mainly wanted to know the prevalent sentiment in the adcom world regarding my question in the thread – is getting a letter from a professor who you’ve only had one class with an issue? Of course I have no experience in admissions but that’s hard for me to believe that those letters automatically wouldn’t be given a lot of weight for the simple reason that they’ve only had one class with the person.
Letters can be on a spectrum I think – strong, good, lukewarm, bad, etc. I feel like the letters I have brought up would be good/average at best but if applicants are dinged for weak letters then, again, its hard for me to believe that an applicant would be dinged for having letters from people they have had only one class with.
There was another thread recently that brought up that you said poor English/grammar in a letter would hurt an applicant which is simply not true. Think about that – why would an applicant be faulted because of someone else’s English skills? If the letter writer can still effectively communicate their message that’s all that should matter (from my guess). All the adcomms disagreed with you on that as well. My friend’s entire biology department was full of foreign professors. It’s her fault that she had no other choice but to choose professors who had broken English?
Um yeah I’m sure thousands of students have had letters from people who’ve they’ve had multiple classes /have done research with. 50k+ people apply to med school every year. I highly doubt a school would ever ask “why don’t you have stronger letters?”.
Of course at the end of the day I have no choice but to go with these letters. I’m grateful that my professors have agreed to write me strong letters. I just think if in the worst case scenario that I have to reapply it wouldn’t be my LORs that I needed to improve. But if anyone has any additional insight on this I would like to hear it.
The problem with this 'argument', (your word not mine) is that you are going based on a bunch of "I feels", "I think", and then make some baseless comment, "simply not true", when you have zero experience or foundation. Poor writing is poor writing. There are letters that are borderline unintelligible and they absolutely reflect negatively. Do most of us on committees realize that it isn't the applicant's writing? Absolutely. But, certainly not everyone can separate themselves from the abysmal writing that can be displayed. It 'shouldn't' matter that someone's letter writers are poor writers, but invariably, they are poorer communicators and that does hurt the applicant one way or another. In my limited experience, foreign trained professors tend to be rather good writers compared to many American trained. For starters, generally they are in the position they are in not because of writing skills and so the two are largely independent, but further, people that know the aren't as good at writing tend to be more explicit and straight forward, which helps applicants. The biggest danger is having someone who thinks that they are a good writer, but in fact are terrible.
Second, lets be precise here. The thread was from 7 months ago. If you actually read the thread, only one person disagreed with me (
@Goro ) and my response to him would have been that while he may thinking that he may not penalize applicants for a letter writer's poor grammar/writing, #1 He can not possibly consider himself infallible #2 Even if he IS infallible, of the thousands of ADCOMs in the US, most of them are not and some will be judgmental, even if it is subconscious.
I have sat in admissions committee meeting where the exact question was posed, "If he was really 'that good', why are his letters complete ****?" At least 1 in 3 meetings had some direct mention/discussion of someone's LOR, either positive or negative. What is the best possible thing that a LOR written by someone who has had you for 1 semester can say? What is the best possible thing that someone who has ONLY seen you in a classroom/office hour visit can say? My personal opinion is that even taking 2-3 classes with someone is the foundation of a weak letter. Will it harm you? No. Will it help you at all? Absolutely not. I don't need a professor to tell me that you got an 'A' in their class or that you are hard working or a good learner, etc. I have your transcript for your grades and those other things are the baseline, not the exception. LOR are a forum for people to brag about you in ways that you can't because of humility.
We get it OP, you're letters aren't going to be great and you want external validation that it isn't 'your fault' or that it 'shouldn't matter'. In all likelihood, it won't make any difference. You don't have strong advocates for who knows what reason. As you said, you have no choice with the bed you've made, so you have to go with it. Not exactly sure what the point of the original post was, except to argue.
Other than my research PI, all my letters came from professors I'd only had for one semester. Come to think of it, I didn't have any professor for more than one semester over my entire college career: orgo had two instructors, physics had two instructors, pchem had two instructors, biochem had two instructors.... I thought that was normal.
As
@LizzyM has pointed out to me, I applied to medical school a decade ago. I assume that you applied earlier than I did. While the overall applicant level hasn't increased, many measures have and what was normal 10+ years ago is not normal now.
