What roles do reference letters play?

[lostintime]

I know that a bad reference letter pretty much means no chance of admission. However, I don't see them being in scaled into the score, i.e. 10% reference letter or something. Do they even matter at all? i.e. If someone says something really positive about you, would it really matter if they're not even going to bother taking it into account except to use as a flag to weed people out? Thanks!

[jgray2]

...this is just speculation...

 

i think that reference letters will be important at any school that has reviewers subjectively assess academic and non-academic portions of applications. especially for non academic portions, strong reference letters may help the reviewer feel more positively about you and give you a higher score in those areas. alternatively, a reference letter that bad mouths you may make the reviewer dislike you more, making it less likely that they will give you a good score in the subjective non-academic/academic scores.

 

rule of thumb: best foot forward.

[scarface]

Any referee that would write you a poor reference letter is NOT a decent human being. I don't consider myself a "good" person, and even I wouldn't write a negative reference letter if I thought the candidate was unworthy. Instead, I would simply tell them no (how politely I would is up to you to infer).

 

What I'm getting at, is that everyone who applies to medicine has good references. Therefore, I don't think they play too much of a factor in admissions.

 

That being said, I know someone whose referee played golf with the dean of admissions at a particular Canadian school that shall remain nameless. He claim that's what got him in (or that's what his referee told him).

[lostintime]

Thanks for the replies. You'll be surprised, scarface, I've heard of stories from med students where reserach supervisors have written "not very nice things" about applicants, i.e. they keep to themselves, make little effort to interact w/ others etc. Not that they should lie about these qualities, but if they think that in the first place, maybe they should reject the person's request for a reference letter. Just what I think as well.

 

I still think reference letters should play a good role though, regardless of how "nice" they usually are. It's very different for someone else, and this person being someone who usually says objective things, i.e. professor, volunteer director, doctor, etc. to say something about you rather than you saying it about yourself. I'm obviously not in the place to judge, but if I was on the Admissions Committee, I would value an objective statement about a person's ability to self-direct themselves in learning from a professor more than the person boasting about their own self-directed learning ability. Just my 2 cents.

[p0tus]

Hey,

 

Reference letters should be able to provide an objective assessment of an applicant's character/abilities, but the fact remains that applicants are able to pick and choose who gets to be their references. Thus, a strategic applicant will most likely choose individuals who he/she has a good working relationship with, and ask them to write the letters. I was able to see some of my letters and I was shocked by the praise some of them conveyed! (believe me even I didn't know I possessed such great qualities ) Unless a letter says something terribly negative, for example, if the referee answered "no" to the question "would you be comfortable having the applicant as your physician" I doubt that the letter would carry much weight.

 

Regardless, when asking someone to write your letter pop the question: "Can you write me a STRONG reference letter?" If the person thinks he doesn't know you well enough he will most likely state that he isn't in the best position to write one.