Scholarship letters of recommendation
Will your organization or has your organization eliminated letters of recommendation from your scholarship applications? (Unless it's part of the scholarship fund agreement, of course).
I'd be interested to know your organization's thoughts about that.
Thank you!
Lee O'Neil
(she/her/hers)
Community Foundation of Fayette County, PA
eoneil@cffayettepa.org
Comments
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Hi, Lee -
We're really moving away from letters of rec as it relates to new/future funds, unless the letter of rec would serve some very specific and relevant purpose. Many of our "old" funds are broad in that there's really no distinct measure to help distinguish candidates so a letter of rec is, at times, helpful.
Overall, we're not fans of the letter of rec and have plenty of examples (like others, I'm sure!) that demonstrate the whole exercise is a burden - template from a recommender that you see over and over, the wrong student or opportunity name referenced, etc. It's our position any letters that are not specific in nature serve a broad purpose and are just considered as a resource to help evaluators rather than a item that is specifically evaluated.
Happy to discuss!
Jess Puglisi-Sanders
Program Officer
Community Foundation for the Ohio Valley
1226 Chapline Street
Wheeling, WV 26003
Phone: 304-242-3144
Direct: 304-230-1443
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@LeeONeil We have a couple scholarships that require a specific letter of recommendation from a specific individual (eg coach). For those scholarships that have the requirement in the agreement we do still require letters of recommendation; however, we have generally moved to having a space for the student to include an optional letter of recommendation if they would like. In addition to the points mentioned above (wrong student/opportunity, same generic letter for multiple opportunities) most letters we received were very positive. We felt that the letters were not really providing evaluators with any additional information about the applicant and placing an extra burden on the applicant and those individuals letters were being requested from (often our school counselors).
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Hi Lee,
Our scholarship process does not utilize letters of recommendations, and instead uses a reference questionnaire using the third party functionality. It is two "bullet" style questions, and one longer, free form written answer. This seems to be less taxing on the person who is recommending the student, but also gives them the option to copy and paste some text from a letter of recommendation if they have already written one for a student for other opportunities.
Danielle
6 -
We removed the letters of recommendation for the first time last year in an effort to make the application as easy and accessible as possible for the applicants. I agree that I do not think it adds much helpful information to the application as they all are positive. I think, especially last year, applicants found it difficult to get the information from their recommender. I believe we will leave it off again for our next cycle. I find it more valuable to have a text question about their achievements/volunteer work/activities etc.
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Our policy is to not accept letters of recommendation after the application deadline, but there is currently no way to keep them from being submitted in the system. I have added a suggestion for this improvement in the idea lab. If you would like to see this as well, please vote for it!
Thanks!
Carol
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@CarolReynolds voted! Thank you for posting that in the idea lab. I go in and deny applications that do not have have the required recommendations on the day after the due date, but there could be some that slip by me with a high volume of applications to review. It would be great to have a hard deadline on those third party forms. It gets even trickier when we have some opportunities that require 1 and some that require 2 recommendations.
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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@CarolReynolds and @LaurieAbildso I think this new feature setting might be helpful for your third party workflows with the Universal Application: https://support.foundant.com/hc/en-us/articles/4416167051671-Third-Party-Dashboard-Display-Days
The Third Party Dashboard Display Days setting is accessible under Foundation Settings in your site and allows you to set the number of days a third party request will display on the third party's dashboard (from the date assigned). If your policy is to not accept letters of recommendation after the application deadline, when the deadline passes, you could change the setting to 0 days so that all third party requests are removed from their dashboards. Please keep in mind that this is a site-wide setting and you'll want to be sure to increase the days setting again sometime after the deadline!
As for standalone scholarship process requests (non-UA) when you mark the application complete, the third party request falls off their third party dashboard.
I hope this helps!
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@StephSchneider thank you--we will look at putting that into our procedures for next year.
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Thank you, @StephSchneider. That sounds look a good workaround for now.
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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