I often receive requests for grad school recommendation letters from undergraduate students I don’t know well — for example, students who have taken one or two large courses with me, but never a seminar or another smaller course where I get more of a sense of the individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. In such cases, I advise students to seriously consider whether I am the best choice to write them a letter, even if they performed well.
This advice is primarily for my (current or former) undergraduate students whom I don’t know well, who are considering asking me for a recommendation letter. If you have taken a smaller course with me that involved a lot of discussion and a paper I graded myself, that’s a different story — ignore this page and talk to me directly. Likewise, if you are a philosophy grad student already and you want a letter for something, ignore this page and talk to me about that directly.
The advice below also does not apply for students wishing to apply to the UBC Honours program. Students interested in that can also ignore the below and talk to me directly.
In all cases of deciding whether and how to write reference letters, I am guided by three goals:
to help students have the best chance at achieving their goals by writing positive letters;
to maintain my own personal and academic integrity by writing openly and honestly, rather than puffing students up in an exaggerated or dishonest way; and
to keep my workload manageable.
What this last consideration primarily means in this context is that, for students I don’t know well already, any letter I write would be based primarily on their performance in my course(s). I am unable to study students’ dossiers to discover reasons they’re excellent candidates that didn’t come up in my courses. (Admissions committees can find that kind of thing out themselves — recommendation letters are for more distinctive first-personal knowledge.)
Here are some guidelines for students considering asking me for a letter:
If you are applying for law school or grad school in philosophy, it will be important that you have letter-writers who can speak to your philosophy-specific abilities, especially your writing. If your main assessment with me has been via essays graded by TAs, or my formal logic course, I won’t be able to speak to these critical elements. The best I’ll be able to do is to describe my course, and how well you did in it, and how that compares to the class average. In these situations I usually suggest that students are better off seeking letters from other instructors who know them better.
If you are applying for a postgraduate degree program in another academic field, the advice above probably also applies, with the additional consideration that you will usually be best-off with a letter from someone with specific expertise in that field.
I do recognize that some programs have a requirement for a number of letters, and, depending on what courses you took, you might not have the ideal letter-writers available. If you think that I am your best choice, even in light of what I have said here, you can ask me to write a “bare-bones” letter. I won’t be able to say much, but it will be a recommendation letter. (I will not agree to write a letter for you if I can’t in good conscience say that I recommend you for the program.) If you did better than average in my course, I can say that, and I can give some information about what skills good performance in my course requires.
If you wish to ask for a recommendation letter, email me to discuss it further. Please make sure to include in your email:
what kind of program you are applying for;
the timeline and deadlines for any letters I might need to write;
a list of courses you’ve taken with me (including term number, so that I can easily look it up), along with the grades you received; and
an indication that you have reviewed this page, and understand that if you’ve only had large courses with me, I can only write you a fairly minimal letter.