As you can imagine, I have a lot of students per year. If we include the entire year (Summer as well), I have roughly 1000 students in the courses I teach. I’m sure you can imagine how many request letters of recommendation each semester. Now do I want to help out my students in their path through academia and beyond, OF COURSE! However, it shouldn’t be a full time job. More importantly, in almost all cases, I literally have nothing to say.

In academia we have federal law entitled, Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). We’re not allowed to disclose grades / personal information. While this can be waived in situations like this, given how serious this is taken (based experience with Colleagues discussions about it for 20 years), I would feel obligated to keep records for each one and it would get unruly.

Secondly, many students when requesting letters provide their Resume, Transcripts, and other documents. While I am sure someone told them to do that sometime in their history, let’s think about this. If I am writing a letter of recommendation for a student, it should be based on my experience with the student. Writing letters based on claims of students is in my opinion bordering on an unethical behavior. Some students may lie about items on their Resume or perhaps mildly embellish. In truth, I cannot attest to the accuracy of ANYTHING a student provides outside of what I have witnessed myself.

So let’s say I did write a letter. Since our course structure is such that I am the one lecturing, my interaction with students to be able to say anything of value is minimal. Sure I may have a brief conversation here or there before class, however, given the amount of students I have, that really doesn’t stand out in any way but instead is just relatively standard.

So the best thing for a student would be to obtain a letter of recommendation that has significant value. This can only happen when you work with an professor in a closer relationship such that they can say fantastic things about you. So for me, I only write letters of recommendation for my honors students and volunteers. In normal settings, e.g. outside covid and personal life issues, I meet with those students for 30 minutes to an hour per week and by the end of the semester I feel I know them fairly well. I can speak to punctuality, work ethic, work product, intelligence, dedication, mathematical understanding, etc…

So I encourage my students to attempt to develop relationships with your professors. There are many pathways that exist. You can be Graders, Tutors, Instructional Aids, Honors Students, and Research Aids just to name a few. As engineers there is the FURI program that still is around I believe, in which students conduct their own research underneath the guidance of one of their professors. There are many ways to make connections and recommendation letters from those situations will go MUCH farther than any one professor stating….

They were in my class. They were in the top 10 for the course. They paid attention in class.