Dear academics
We could dramatically reduce our administrative workload if we all just agreed not to ask for reference letters until we made our list of finalists.
This is massive collective action problem has already been solved by…
*checks notes*
…every other industry on earth.
We could dramatically reduce our administrative workload if we all just agreed not to ask for reference letters until we made our list of finalists.
This is massive collective action problem has already been solved by…
*checks notes*
…every other industry on earth.
Reposted from
David Barner
Who is for abolishing grad app letters of rec at the point of application? Would it be so bad if letters were requested AFTER candidates were shortlisted? If we do this at UCSD who will join us?
Comments
(a) they have an HR department involved in doing it
(b) they can modify administrative portals (SLATE)
(c) they do not read 30 page work samples or translate GPAs from Nigeria.
This boils down to is funding and autonomy. State institutions lack these.
In the company I work for, students on internships only get a letter with objective statements that can be extracted from the HR system
And you're introducing another one 'letter writer characteristics', but that person isn't applying.
Alt view: "Go on candidate, impress us with who you know."
For a quant discipline, a lot of importance is placed on generating effortful qualitative hype.
And those who were finalists would at least get useful information about how close they got to getting various jobs.
Those of us who have spent a minute in industry quickly realize how absurd academia is about stuff like this. It’s probably a vestige of hiring practices in 1890s Germany.
1) You can still use them to distinguish among finalists
2) They aren't great predictors (ie they are no better than the GRE, which many programs have discarded) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916211055374?fbclid=IwAR0-8H-uAo0bC7x2n_bgfJ70HLHNcEe1ot15xhP-pBrzTDFpTfyEZq8kAks#appendix-3
If you have seen such evidence I’d be happy to read it with an open mind.
(Reminder: the status quo is not inevitable, or useful)
It explicitly states that social capital is valued in academia, but should it be?
It’s the bad kind of importance, the kind we should eliminate.
Academics do this nonstop all day long. For instance, that’s why we have abstracts for papers. You read the abstract to determine if the paper is relevant enough to read the entire thing. Same logic.