How Harvard uses recommendation letters

HHarvard's admissions readers do not only read recommendation letters; they rate them. The court record from the SFFA trial lists ratings for up to four teacher and counselor letters among the roughly fourteen scores each applicant receives. Files that students later requested show something more useful still: what readers did with the letters once they had read them.

For families, this changes what a letter is. Most parents think of it as a character reference that either arrives warm or does not, and they leave its contents entirely to the teacher. The files suggest the letter does a more specific job inside the reader's own notes, and that a generic one can quietly cost a student on a rating that has nothing to do with grades.