A philosopher from a liberal arts college writes about letters of recommendations based on the experience of s/he and several colleagues having "read literally hundreds of ethics applications...." in recent years:
"We now regard as essentially devoid of cognitive content the evaluative statements in letters from [three very prominent philosophers, names omitted].
"We also had a bad experience with [top 20 department name omitted] last
year, in which a candidate was egregiously 'over-sold' by more than one person there. (Sadly, this may have adversely affected the chances of one of their
candidates this year -- not out of spite, just out of epistemological considerations.) Finally, you probably know this, but we notice that the British and the French tend to be very understated in their letters, as compared with American letter-writers.
"Some of us find that, if we trust the letter-writer, the most helpful comments evaluate the candidate against some comparison class: 'the best of all our
graduate students this year,' 'the best in ethics in the last five years,' 'comparable to our graduates who have been hired by leading research institutions.'"
"Unfortunately, adjectives that are not superlative are generally taken to be indications of problems: 'bright, original and hard-working' is often taken to
mean 'mediocre.' Professors should also be careful about the formulaic phrase 'I am happy to recommend X for a teaching position at your university,' because this will lead some of us to scrutinize the letter to see if that suggest 'a teaching position AS OPPOSED TO one where research is important.'"
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