Commmittee Letter Question

[yoowhoo]

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I attend a school that provides a committee letter to any student who requests one. I'm taking 2+ gap years and have a somewhat lower science GPA (3.7), so I'm wondering if there's any way to estimate the wording my committee letter might use.

For example, do schools typically reserve phrases like "highly recommend" for students with something like a 3.9 GPA, while a 3.7 GPA might receive a simple "recommend"? My school isn't very transparent about the language or rating system they use.

If I suspect I may not receive the strongest possible recommendation, is it still better to use the committee letter, or would it ever make sense not to?

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Eight Questions About the Pre-Health “Committee Letter” | Student Doctor Network | SDN

What is the committee letter and is it important? The most commonly asked questions about the committee letter for pre-meds and pre-dents.

www.studentdoctor.net

Every committee letter is different, so there's no way we can answer your question without a name-drop.

Furthermore, if you are taking two gap years, you need to see if that committee will still write a letter for you. Did they write an evaluation while you were still in school that they can draw from, or will it be a new evaluation from scratch? That's important because your concern about the "code phrases" like highly recommend depends on when the evaluation is taken. Some schools are explicit in their use of code phrases with rubrics while others avoid them entirely.

Committee letters are much less common due to the amount of work committed to prepare a good letter. If you are applying after 2 gap years, the committee letter can help give readers an idea of the context of your education (for example, during COVID-19). Otherwise, a committee letter may be helpful in situations where a medical school has a longstanding relationship with feeder programs... but again, being out of school for a couple of years doesn't necessarily help here.

I can say that committee letters are more helpful in providing context to one's education if one comes in with less than exemplary metrics. Many applicant evaluations have benefited when a candidate has a 3.5-3.7 GPA but a stronger impression/impact on the university they attended.

 

[Goro]

I attend a school that provides a committee letter to any student who requests one. I'm taking 2+ gap years and have a somewhat lower science GPA (3.7), so I'm wondering if there's any way to estimate the wording my committee letter might use.

For example, do schools typically reserve phrases like "highly recommend" for students with something like a 3.9 GPA, while a 3.7 GPA might receive a simple "recommend"? My school isn't very transparent about the language or rating system they use.

If I suspect I may not receive the strongest possible recommendation, is it still better to use the committee letter, or would it ever make sense not to?

This is impossible to answer, and it is worthless for you to spend any time speculating about it. Do the best you can

 

[eigen]

We completely avoid ranking phrases in our committee letters. We recommend all of our students, because if we didn't we wouldn't be writing them a letter.

 

[LizzyM]

We completely avoid ranking phrases in our committee letters. We recommend all of our students, because if we didn't we wouldn't be writing them a letter.

Every school is different. Some will make a holistic review, based not just on GPA but also taking into account whether the courses taken and the load was particularly challenging or less so, other activities, distance traveled, etc. Then they are going to recommend every applicant but they may "recommend" or "recommend with reservations" (didn't have enough clinical exposure or something else is of concern) or "highy recommend" or "most highly recommend". Once you know a school's superlatives you can recognize that "strongly recommend" is lower than "most strongly" or whatever dancing the school does to make the letter, standing alone, look nice, but when taken with 100 others, tells you where the applicant falls in the hierarchy.

 

[eigen]

Every school is different. Some will make a holistic review, based not just on GPA but also taking into account whether the courses taken and the load was particularly challenging or less so, other activities, distance traveled, etc. Then they are going to recommend every applicant but they may "recommend" or "recommend with reservations" (didn't have enough clinical exposure or something else is of concern) or "highy recommend" or "most highly recommend". Once you know a school's superlatives you can recognize that "strongly recommend" is lower than "most strongly" or whatever dancing the school does to make the letter, standing alone, look nice, but when taken with 100 others, tells you where the applicant falls in the hierarchy.

Oh, absolutely. I wasn't intending to say that's the way everyone does it, was just providing an example for the "everyone does it differently" to the OP.

That said, I can imagine how "fun" it is to read between the lines of every possible superlative. When we did provide rankings, we always had a clear part in the cover letter that outlined what our rankings were relative to each other since we knew other schools had their own superlatives.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

In my day, I gave a distribution of the proportion of applicants associated with recommendation jargon after seeing a few of my peers collect and present this information (over 5 years) as part of their committee/institutional letters. I also sent and received rubrics. And there are still many who will NOT give this comparative information citing it is not appropriate to judge the applicant against standardized avatars (my wording, not theirs) if mission fit is truly important.