Academic References

[KittyMcKitty]

Following on from the thread about Personal Statements I wondered if anyone knew how much emphasis (if any) admissions tutors put on a students academic reference.

I’d not given it any consideration previously but dd’s referee has written such a lovely reference talking about her suitability for the course she’s applying for and undergraduate study I just wondered if it got more then a cursory glance to check she hadn’t burnt the school down or similar.

I am a former Russell Group admissions tutor. The answer to your question is that it varies quite a bit.

If the school has a reputation for sharing the letter with pupils and their families, this is perceived as compromising the writer’s independence. Genuinely independent letters are important for facilitating equal access to HE. Most experienced writers are fluent in doublespeak, but we much prefer an unseen letter.

The other factors would be the school’s reputation with our School and the correlation between the letter and your DD’s pg’s. If the school has a good reputation with pg’s and your DD’s pg’s are consistent with her applications, all of that will help the reception of the letter. But the best thing the school can do is change to a policy of unseen letters and state this.

Gosh wish it was the same at my daughter's school! Her recommendation is by her form tutor who doesn't teach her anything nor does my daughter particularly like, and as my daughter is applying to art school I'm surprised they don't let her art teacher write it. I haven't seen it though.
Im sure the answer will be the same - some will, some won't, and they may use it as a tie breaker.

I write these references as part of my teaching job. I would love to know how carefully they're read, too, but my guess is that it varies hugely even within a university between particular courses. For some subjects, there really isn't a space on the main UCAS form to include essential points (eg voluntary work, social/communication skills for medics) and so the Personal Statement and the Reference is (I assume!) more important.

@mondaytosunday An art teacher writes all the art-school references at my place... but as I think we've discussed elsewhere, I think that the only point of the UCAS form in the Arts is to get the uni to request a portfolio/audition!

@poetryandwine, are you aware that UCAS advise schools to predict grades that will be achieved "in positive circumstances"? See here: www.ucas.com/advisers/managing-applications/predicted-grades-what-you-need-know-entry-year

By making judgements about schools on the accuracy of their predictions, and penalising applicants for it, you are undermining schools' efforts to predict grades that they believe are achievable in a "happy day' scenario. Students from less privileged backgrounds or with difficult circumstances are most likely to be impacted by that. Prioritising accuracy on average, rather than giving marginal students the benefit of the doubt, would probably result in an unacceptable number of students being under-predicted.

Just to add, you are able to ask UCAS to send you a copy of your reference, under GDPR. So all references are able to be seen by the applicant.

Hello, @imaginayto and @MatildaJayne .

Admissions tutors tend to be familiar with UCAS.

Actually it is well known that pg’s from schools sending small percentages of students to university are the ones that are low relative to pupil outcomes. (Idon’t have time to search for a link, but seem to recall that Cambridge has done some of the research.) This is a grave disservice and a difficult one for the sector to address. My concern is that the letters from these schools may also be less supportive. The consistency in this is not what anyone would wish for.

However this damping of pg’s does not make these schools the source of concern. Quite the opposite. The schools that give us pause, @imaginayto, are almost exclusively middle class schools that tell parents and pupils what they want to hear but do not have a reputation for delivering results. Bad days are fairly uniformly distributed (except amongst struggling schools, not the ones under discussion) and do not affect reputations.

Thanks, @MatildaJayne , I believe every academic up and down the land is trained in GDPR. Any of us has a legal right to much of our data after the fact. That is quite a different thing from running it by us before submitting it.

At another level, many academics simply will not write letters of reference for competitive postgraduate study, no matter how glowing, unless the student waives access, because non-waived letters are not taken as seriously and are sometimes regarded as a yellow (not, I think, red) flag. And I simply cannot imagine anyone on the academic job market declining to waive access.

But we are mainly talking about teacher references to UCAS of Y13 students. The university would never know that the student had asked to see their reference, admittedly after submission. It looked like you were saying earlier that it was only if schools chose to share them that students could see them. Not doubting your experience but just wanted to clear up that misconception for other parents in case they read it as I did.

I was responding to the OP originally.

I only mentioned the other situations to indicate that confidential letters, up to GDPR, are the norm in HE. Applicants can be placed most accurately, in line with their long term interests, when teachers can feel free to write letters that are almost always as supportive as realistically possible but not subject to the possibility of external influences. Especially when tutors look out for applicants from under- represented schools, which is becoming typical throughout the Russell Group.

At another level, many academics simply will not write letters of reference for competitive postgraduate study, no matter how glowing, unless the student waives access, because non-waived letters are not taken as seriously and are sometimes regarded as a yellow (not, I think, red) flag. And I simply cannot imagine anyone on the academic job market declining to waive access.

I am surprised at this being given as a context for why academics want unseen UCAS references. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. But, in the context of actual academic job references, I've known people who not only expect a reference letter to be seen by the applicant, but actively ask the applicant to draft it for their editing or signature. I'm not sure what I think of this as a practice; I've never done it (though I have asked applicants whether there's some aspect of their time with me they would find particularly helpful/unhelpful for me to talk about). But it's very different from an unseen reference, isn't it?

Hi, @SarahAndQuack

I don’t happen to think it is great practice to ask people to draft their own letters, but perhaps conventions in our fields differ. In mine it is common to make comparisons between the person one is writing for and other recent or current candidates for similar jobs, when this benefits the person under consideration. One can hardly ask the candidate to perform this analysis.

However there is a spectrum. The boundary between a fluent, well written description of a candidate’s work and a draft of a non-comparative letter.is permeable. And the candidate showing you a letter is very different to you showing them one: you are free to change what they’ve written without informing them. This is a crucial difference.

If I were a candidate ‘writing my own letter’ I would err on the side of modesty. I expect more women than men would, and I wonder if this is true?

But the main reason admissions tutors prefer unseen letters is that they are more useful.

Oh, sure, I live in hope people who've refereed for me changed my drafts, and I think that's an interesting point about modesty (!). I just felt that, at least in my field, it would be strange to say an unseen reference letter would seem inappropriate in academia by making analogy to how we'd write references for our own students/colleagues.

TBH I've only ever worked somewhere where we used reference letters from schools to provide details on things like an atypical schooling experience or illness or whatever - my understanding is we didn't bother about anything else precisely because it wasn't ever very useful or accurate.