Every time an undergraduate applies for graduate school, a graduate student applies for a postdoc, or a postdoc applies for a tenure-track job, he or she must ask at least three professors for a letter of recommendation. And, every time and tenure-track professor goes up for a promotion, his or her institution must ask 5-20 professors for letters or recommendation. As a result, many professors find themselves writing 10-20 letters of recommendation per year.
Many institutions recognize that writing a letter is a time-consuming task. As such, they make submitting a letter a quick and painless process: click on a link, upload a letter, done. But, at some institutions, in order to submit a letter, a professor must additionally fill out some bullet-based rating of the person he or she is writing about. When one considers that undergraduates typically apply to 10+ graduate schools, filling out such bullet-based rating systems quickly eats into a professor's time.
My department chair suggested a method to me a few years ago that he uses to minimize the amount of time he spends on such rating systems. At the end of every letter of recommendation he writes the following:
P.S. If your application system requires that I fill out a number- or bullet-based rating form, I have either omitted this or filled out the highest rating for everything if the system did not allow me to continue otherwise. I appreciate that you use this information in your evaluations, but I recommend that you change your system to account for the over-extension that all of us in academia experience with writing of many letters of recommendation each year.
This method saves him time and does not hurt the student for whom he is writing a letter. I now use this technique when I write letters and find it to be a significant time-saver.
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