Why ChatGPT Can’t Write Your College Recommendation

Each year that I teach one section of junior English students, I end up writing college recommendations for about 85% of the class. That usually means completing about 16 or 17 letters, plus a few from past sophomores. Some years it tops out at 25 or 26. 

I’m in the throes of writing them at the moment, and it’s best to take a folio leaf out of Shakespeare’s playbook when beginning the process: “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly.” It’s best, sure, but not often possible. 

To the extent that college recommendations are a formality for a great many students currently attending competitive high schools across America, and they often are, there exists the possibility that they help admissions officers make small-but-meaningful distinctions about candidates. 

About fifteen years ago, the dean of admissions for a prestigious university gave a talk to the entire SHS faculty about what her (specific) school wanted to see in these letters from us. It was a moment of profound condescension. A mid-forties professional telling a room stacked with over 150 teachers (with a combined classroom experience of 3,000 years) what does and doesn’t belong in a college recommendation was the height of hubris. 

A hair-raising moment came when the woman said to us - in semi-confidence - “If you honestly believe that the student you’re recommending isn’t a good fit for our school, then please make that crystal clear in the letter. Spell it out for us, directly. We really appreciate that kind of candor. It would save everyone a great deal of trouble.” [What stands out most about this moment is just how out-of-touch the speaker was with the current state of college recommendations: one couldn’t write “a letter to Harvard, Yale or Princeton;” one wrote for The Common Application).  

In the simplest terms, a college recommendation is a letter of unconditional support for one specific student that you know remarkably well. If you can’t offer that in the first place to the asker - if you aren’t qualified to sing their praises offering highly illustrated vignettes, anecdotes, and examples - then don’t say yes. To hide behind the fact that 100% of students have signed away their rights to read your letter by checking the FERPA waiver box is no excuse — it’s cowardice. 

In the macro, a college rec is a sales pitch — a refined rhetorical appeal — if not a psychological profile that shows: I understand this person in one specific way or another and here’s how they might best serve your institution. 

The level of specificity required to write such a letter makes them ChatGPT-proof. 

Yet some have tried. 

Mark Kamakawi is an assistant professor of private law at a university in the Netherlands. He fed ChatGPT the prompt: Write a recommendation letter for a law student looking for an internship.

What was generated was on par with any corporate form-letter you’ve ever received in the mail, or found shunted into your spam folder like the notification of a Hyundai recall. It was soulless, uber-generic, and had all the warmth of an eviction notice. Kamakawi’s assessment is startling: 

“In all honesty, it’s not half bad right?! If I were to add a few personal anecdotes and individualized competencies, would students be satisfied with a letter of this caliber? For admission offices, would this letter be a factor that would contribute to the student’s candidacy? I would be quite curious about their inputs, but I for one think that there is some added value here for teachers and staff members who are asked to draft dozens of letters each year. If we are able to reduce some of the time we invest into our administrative tasks such as this - without compromising too much on quality - that is more time we can spend on teaching or researching. If only there was an AI system that would grade exams, now that would be a true game changer!”

Suddenly, it’s no longer hard to imagine a world of dumbed-down things as laid out in the great Mike Judge dark comedy, Idiocracy. Or that Idiocracy is no longer a satire. 

Isn’t the entire point of any letter of recommendation that you are - wait for it - recommending them, not generically approximating the idea of them? Multiple people are relying on you - for once in your lazy existence - to not take the shortcut. Kamakawi’s misbelief is that a prefab structure or template outline is the same as almost having a full letter completed. You just need to add water and - POOF - instant oatmeal, just as good as the real thing that spent all night cooking. Why wait, right? The “added water” here is just listing “a few personal anecdotes and individualized competencies.” But it’s not, though. 

Synthesizing a human being into 1500 words (or so), that thoughtfully represent them is all craft-work: pulling from old emails, handwritten notes, essays, homework, speaker’s notes, Google Slide decks, and the balance of the body of output that a student has left behind after taking your class. It’s going back to examine their digital footprint, draft-back style, looking at their Docs’ editing history in real time, reflecting on conversations had during writing and grading conferences, class discussions, and ideas exchanged after the bell. 

To some, like Kamakawi, those things just fill themselves in. He also fantasizes about a day when A.I. will mark his assessments for him: why would someone want to teach who doesn’t want to engage with what they assign, or do the intellectual heavy-lifting of honoring their students with tributes not mired in the thick, stiff, inflexible language of robots? 

You can’t honor the living or the dead by speaking about them at the cliche-level. 

There’s one-step removed from having A.I. write your student recs for you: it’s writing about your subjects using cliches. 

Sometimes a student’s essay, and something generated by ChatGPT are indistinguishable, simply because both can be completely generic and uninspired.  

Most writers aren’t even conscious of how frequently they deploy hackneyed phrases like so many soldiers sent into a fog of words. 

When you see fresh, personalized writing juxtaposed with trite, generic prattle, the difference  screams out at you. Same person, same college recommendation, and same paragraph. One is written as a meaningful reflection of my relationship with the student, the other is a series of worthless statements applicable to anyone and everyone (therefore no one in particular — therefore utterly worthless).

Version One - The Jessica I actually observed:  

“Whether Jessica was engaging with a world-famous psychotherapist that had been saving rock bands and pulling celebrities out of tailspins for sixty years, or delighting a NYT bestselling author who found humor and kindred spiritedness with a sixteen-year-old scholar-in-the-making, she was being Jessica. For the world is awash in slacktivism, false outrage, political correctness gone wrong, trigger warnings and (both) actual fake news and meaningful reportage that is reframed as inauthentic. Here’s Jessica, as herself, to lead us through, past, and over, all of that unpleasantness.”

Version Two - The generic Jessica: 

“Jessica added her voice to the conversation (about this essay) after burning the midnight oil to prepare for our class discussion. Well, she really came to play. She entered the room with bells on. She was in it to win it, let me tell you. I can’t stress this enough. Her determination was palpable: you could cut it with a knife. She bared her soul to the room, offering one chestnut after another, and it wasn’t pearls before swine. She shared (as sharing is caring) that the essay (which was a commentary on race) had opened old wounds. The class offered her a Band-Aid in the form of (not back-slapping) but validation. They gave back. They saw someone hurting, and they rose to the occasion. I was humbled that day, like I’d never been humbled before. It’s what I’d like to call a teachable moment. That’s why working with Jess is always so valuable: her comment that day in our English class was worth the price of admission alone for my other students, and for myself, to be sure. I wanted no refund. I had no buyer’s remorse. I was happy with my purchase. As her teacher, that day in class, I was like a proud papa. Jessica cares, she is community-minded, she fights for those who can’t fight for themselves. She’s a breath of fresh air. She lights up the room. She is a guiding light, a beacon, and a lighthouse. She’ll lead the way but she’ll take no credit. She’s selfless in that regard. A Mother Theresa of mindfulness and wellness. A pied-piper leading us to the Promised Land.” 

You’d be surprised by how many students bring me drafts of their college essays to look over that are little more than a list of cliches: just one beaten-to-death phrase after another. 

It’s really just the diction of Artificial Intelligence (or might as well be) — the words, language patterns, and thought constructions “of others” aggregated into 650 words. Anyone could have written 80% of the personal statements that (initially) land on my desk. There’s no voice, no distinctive features, and no arresting language.

The goal for us all - as teachers, professors, or anyone recommending students for competitive programs domestically and abroad - is to swear off the possibility of ever using ChatGPT or A.I. services.

They’re not remotely tempting to me. 

I have a colleague who said something to me that sounded just like Kamakawi. After I’d given my classes a particularly challenging essay prompt, he’d fed the directive to ChatGPT with “very good results.” 

With all due respect: they were not “very good results.”  

I remember writing a response to him that was something like: “ChatGPT didn’t even do the one thing I had asked my students to do. And it has no soul, no humanness, which you can smell from a long distance away.” 

To that beautiful end, a letter of recommendation must be its own dramatic retelling of a student’s impact on you, your class, their classmates, the physical environment, and the larger community. Some recs read like: the meteor crashed but there’s no record of it. If you’re writing for your student, you’re repping them, not wrecking them: How did they change you? Not - just - how did they change? And certainly not - what’s unremarkable about them, or how are they like everyone else? You may not mean to say that, but you often do.  

Lana Weiser was someone who crash-landed on my planet two years ago in junior honors English, and I tried to capture what that was like (best represented in this brief excerpt):

“I never respected spoken word poetry until I lived it with Lana Weiser. Sure, I’d seen Def Poetry Jam on HBO with Amiri Baraka and Dave Chappelle, and I’d heard of open mic nights at cafes that featured angry young poets doing their best beatnik or SJW impressions… 

But Lana took me to the mountaintop: where spoken word existed on the same plane as what Wallace Stevens set down on the printed page back in mid-century West Hartford.

Lana is, well, confessional. She practices a philosophy (with me, anyway, and perhaps many others in her life, but I’d like to think I’m special), called “radical honesty.” Now, Brad Blanton invented the term and the lifestyle, and he has been married and divorced four times (so there is great risk to saying what’s on your mind, or, even worse, what’s deep inside your soul). What moved me about Lana, long before the poetry, was her masterful creation of autofiction-essay-writing: a kind of Truman Capote In Cold Blood revolution where you intersect with the story, you become the story, and you reveal all along the way. You get at truths (like facts), but you also “get at” the rank recesses of YOU. It’s the Jungian truth, too: the only way forward is inward. And there’s the Christopher Nolan truth: the only way forward is downward — down into the basement of the subconscious. And that’s what Lana Weiser exhumes and compellingly presents to the reader, or to anyone in conversation with her. Or to anyone within her gravitational pull.” 

Oftentimes, once students have committed to one college or university, they’ll ask me for a copy of their recommendation letter. At that point, I’m delighted to share it with them (despite the FERPA waiver, which really just protects the writer from having it released against their wishes). 

It’s a lovely moment. I’ve had students tell me that reading (and re-reading) my rec letter got them through the second semester of senior year; that they cried for hours performing it aloud to their family; and that no one had ever written anything like that about them in their entire lives.  

A long-ago retired colleague of mine had once run afoul of the college admissions process when a former student of theirs was pulled from a college tour and ushered to the admissions office for a private conference. 

After being shown the letter of recommendation (which violated the FERPA waiver), the student was devastated to learn that the teacher had written some unflattering things that seemed to intentionally sabotage their candidacy. 

While my colleague drew some heat for it, I asked what had brought them to undermine a student’s entire academic journey in the eleventh hour:

“I have a responsibility to tell these colleges the truth. These schools know me by name. I’ve been writing these letters for decades and they know that they can trust me not to varnish over a candidate’s weaknesses.” 

When I pushed back, saying that it was our job to “unconditionally recommend” or not agree to write on their behalf in the first place, it was clear that this veteran teacher had failed to grasp that writing a college recommendation is a selfless, egoless act of giving over four hours of your life to slighting improving someone else’s chances of attending the school of their dreams. 

But if we lean on ChatGPT to get these letters done — another to-do list item checked off so we can go back to teaching, researching, writing (something else), networking, maximizing our social media’s gravitational force — then why get to know our students at all? Why bother have them understand us? Why teach them how to think and how to write for themselves, if we don’t do the same? 

And if we don’t, that means - in the end - that we can’t, and that it no longer matters anyway.