Admission and Scholarship Hopefuls and How their Former Lecturers Harm them With Lazy Recommendation Letters
I recently came across a write-up written by Prof. Moses Ochonu, and it is one of the best write-ups to read if you are an aspirant of emigration looking for admission or scholarship abroad. I like the article so much because it would be what I would have written on how lecturers act like gods when their former students need them to write a recommendation letter for them when they are seeking admission or scholarship in furtherance of their education, and how when they respond to a lucky student’s request for recommendation, they do it in a way that would have no good boost it’s giving the applicant on getting the admission or scholarship they need such recommendation for. This is a very awful work behaviour among the Nigerian lecturers and it doesn’t look like a lot of people are yet thinking it’s high time the academic staff unions, the schools management, the schools commission were pressured to educate their lecturer members and employees to take jobs like this seriously. Let me drop the write-up by Professor Moses below, he discusses this problem better than I would.
(article continues after advert break)
WRITING RECOMMENDATION LETTERS
Let's discuss how Nigerians
unintentionally--or as a compatriot told me recently, intentionally--sabotage
other Nigerians' chances of upward socioeconomic and educational mobility. A
talented Nigerian student/graduate is applying to a graduate program in Euro-America
and asks her current or former lecturers to write her the required
recommendation letters. Some of the lecturers don't even bother to write the
letter. The applicant has to chase them down and plead. Sometimes they have to
travel from one part of the country to the other to plead in person as phone calls, texts, and
emails don't work with the lecturers. It's as though the lecturers don't want
to support the applicant's foreign educational aspirations. It's part of their
job, but lecturers act as if they're doing their current and former students a
favor by writing these letters. Many applicants have missed critical
application deadlines because of this attitude.
The ones who agree to write the
letter take the most cavalier attitude to it. They write unusably perfunctory
nonsense such as "Ms so and so was a student in our department; she was a
well behaved student; she worked hard and performed well in her classes; she
has a good character and is very respectful; her academic record is okay."
Far from helping the applicant's chances, this type of letter actually damages
and puts her at a disadvantage in relation to her fellow applicants. I should
know, since I've served on both graduate admissions and fellowship and grant
committees many times. Where to begin? First of all such a letter says nothing,
absolutely nothing, about the applicant's intellectual abilities, unique
academic skills, or the specificities of their academic record. It is too general to be useful. It does not
offer any insight into the lecturer's academic/intellectual relationship with
the applicant, so why should we take the letter writer seriously as someone who
can vouch for the applicant?
There is no mention of classes
the applicant took with the lecturer, how they did in such classes, how they
stood out, what they did to impress the lecturer, why the lecturer believes the
applicant would thrive and blossom in the graduate program, etc. There is no
praise, no enthusiasm--only bland, lukewarm, generic comments. It's better not
to write a recommendation than to write one that does not endorse the applicant
or highlight her intellectual promise and quality. Then there is the issue of
brevity. Some of these letters that I've seen are one paragraph or at most
two--too sketchy to offer any substantive glimpse into the applicant's
abilities or give one a sense of the applicant's unique talents and
intellectual drive.
Finally, there is the annoyingly
meaningless deployment of Nigerian idiosyncrasies and cliches. When a Nigerian
lecturer writes "hardworking," the North American evaluators of the
applicant's materials read it as "mediocre." When the evaluators see
a word such as "solid," they don't think it indicates excellence, as
it might in Nigeria. In popular and even professional Nigerian usage,
"okay" means good. Not so in the North American educational parlance.
It does not mean good. Rather, it denotes bad or mediocre. Saying someone is
"okay" indicates reservation, that the letter writer is holding back
outright praise because the applicant does not deserve it. And nobody wants to
know or cares about the applicant's personal character, so commenting on how
well behaved or respectful she is is an unhelpful digression at best and at
worst a damaging indication that you have nothing substantive or glowing to say
about her academic abilities and intellectual talent. What has the applicant
being "kind" got to do with her ability to undertake graduate work,
cope with its rigors, and do well?
I don't know whether it is
laziness on the part of the lecturers or a lack of awareness about Western
higher educational conventions. I suppose it's a mix of the two. Whatever it is,
these lecturers are destroying the chances and prospects of talented Nigerian
applicants, who lose out of opportunities because their former or current
teachers write non-recommendation recommendation letters on their behalf. I've lived and worked in America long enough
to know that, in making admission and other decisions, no evaluator will ignore
a sketchy, general, and lukewarm endorsement from a person who purportedly
knows and has taught and mentored the applicant--the recommender. If the
recommending lecturer doesn't sound so enthusiastic about the applicant, why
should I? That's the general attitude. Ignorance of what is expected in the
letter is no excuse. I've even seen such a letter which was written by a
Nigeria-based lecturer who studied in the US and is thus aware of how critical
recommendation letters are and how they should be written. This lends credence
to the theory that some of this could be intentional sabotage on the part of
some recommending lecturers.
It is sometimes so sad and frustrating
for folks like me to read recommendation letters from North American professors
saying that such and such applicant is a reincarnation of Albert Einstein and
Jacques Derrida in one flesh and then to read a meaningless three-sentence
recommendation letter from a Nigerian lecturer about a Nigerian applicant you
know is much more talented than the North American applicant whose abilities
and talents are being advanced in highfalutin, exaggerated terms. The
interesting thing is that I read recommendation letters written by academics in
other countries for other international applicants and they conform for the
most part to the North American convention of high praise and substantive
commentary on the applicant, her accomplishments, and her ongoing work. We're cheating ourselves and putting
ourselves at a disadvantage in a globalized, hyper-competitive world.
People who read this also have interest in reading
this:
How to be Part of How Student Visa is Making Emigration Easier for Nigerians 01