Should you send a research recommendation letter to MIT?

MMatt McGann, a former MIT director of admissions, warned applicants that a line saying you did research in a university lab is, to a reader, only a claim. Thousands of students make similar claims every year, and the reader has no way to know whether you ran the experiment or watched someone else run it.

For a student who spent a summer doing real work, that doubt is expensive: the hours were genuine, and the activities list presents them exactly as it would present a weekend tour of the lab. McGann's answer to the problem was short, and it applies to anything unusual in a file, research most of all.