Recommendation Letters- General vs. Specific?

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• 1 Like

  c.janson35 Free Trial Inactive Sage Inactive ⭐

  July 2015 2398 karma

  A general letter written specifically is always better than a specific/targeted letter written generally. As long as your reccommender can honestly and meaningfully speak to your strengths you'll be good!
• 1 Like

  Pacifico Alum Inactive ⭐

  July 2015 8021 karma

  @c.janson35 nailed it with his first sentence. Only a handful of schools really like the targeted letters enough to make a difference anyways so it's not going to be that big a deal and it's definitely more of a pain to get a recommender to target letters for multiple schools. Just make sure you can get excellent letters and you'll be good to go.
• jaredj229 Alum Member

  July 2015 110 karma

  Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the Credential Assembly Service included your letters of recommendation in the file they send to each of the schools to which you're applying. My understanding, just based on a quick read through of the process, was that you send them a general letter and they will then send copies of it out on your behalf.
• 1 Like

  c.janson35 Free Trial Inactive Sage Inactive ⭐

  July 2015 2398 karma

  @jaredj229 on your LSAC account you choose which letters you want to assign to which applications. Also, when submitting the request electronically to your recommenders, you can label each of them in order to keep track of which letter is which
• Pacifico Alum Inactive ⭐

  July 2015 8021 karma

  Once again @c.janson35 is absolutely correct. To illustrate his point you could have five LORs and you could rank them 1-5 by your preference and name them accordingly so you know that the best ones are going out first. Or you might have two general ones for all schools and then one each for HYS and so you can make sure those are all properly labeled so that you don't send the wrong one to the wrong school.