A graduate student writes:
Since you posted recently on letters of recommendation and online portals, maybe you would be interested in giving some airtime to another supremely vexing issue in this regard: a number of proprietary application portals prevent applicants from generating the emails with upload links before submission, and instead only send referees links for uploading letters of recommendation after the applicant has fully submitted the application. However, they maintain (or at least espouse to) the same deadline for letters of reference as for the application itself. (Some applications state explicitly that upload links go dead at the deadline.) The result is that an applicant who submits the application on the day of the deadline has given his or her referees something like a 12-hour window to upload their letters.
I struggle to understand why one would design an application portal in such a way; the response that students should take care to submit well before the deadline to ensure that their referees have time seems to defeat the very purpose of having a single deadline for applications and referees. (And indeed, the Harper-Schmidt postdoc at UChicago only generates upload links for referees after submission, but the deadline for referee submission is 2 weeks past the deadline for application submission.) Similarly, the claim that it would reduce incomplete or partial submissions (by not collecting letters until complete applications had been submitted, thus avoiding letters for incomplete applications) is vitiated by making applications incomplete on the other side of the equation-- they now have complete materials but incomplete letters! The single conceivable benefit I can think of is that letter-writers can be certain that they are only writing for someone who has submitted a full application -- but is that really an acceptable gain for knowing that either the applicant or the writer will be harried by the process?
Are there reasons for this that I'm missing? Is there any justification? It just seems like an unnecessary, added inconvenience for all involved in an already stressful process.
And in a follow-up e-mail, the student offered some examples:
Columbia claims no grace period:
TWO letters of recommendation. Recommenders will receive automated notification of your request and instructions for submitting their recommendations once you have submitted the online application form.
Princeton offers a one-week grace period (why not let the applicant generate the request several weeks in advance?):
The three referees named in the online application will be contacted automatically via email with instructions to upload their confidential letters of recommendation to the online portal once the application has been submitted. We ask that applicants submit their application with enough time before the deadline to allow referees to upload their recommendation. While all documents required by the applicant need to be submitted by the September 15 deadline, we allow a grace period for reference letters, i.e., referees may upload these to the online system until September 22.
Chicago offers a two-week grace period (which seems more reasonable)
IMPORTANT: Your recommenders will not be contacted until you submit your application.
Please identify three recommenders below. We will use the contact information you provide to email your recommenders and ask them to fill out an online evaluation. Online recommendations will be accepted no later than October 27, 2017 11:59:59 pm CDT.
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