Let me make my view clear upfront. This is not a post saying that Tuck is doing something wrong. Its just a personal view and one that I think is shared by a lot of the prospective Tuckies, as I found out at the Tuck Reception in Bangalore.
My recommendors came back to me saying that the Tuck recommendation is much more demanding than what they had done for Ross. No, its not that the questions that are demanding, but the fact that each of the questions have a 300 words or fewer (3000 character limit).
I think it makes a lot of sense asking students to write within limits, so that :
- It prevents the applicant from going berserk and writing a saga
- It tests the applicant’s ability to do more with less.
But, a recommendor is a person who :
- Is not the applicant and so doesn’t have the time to spend a whole lot of time on the recommendations.
- Is someone who is being constantly pushed by the applicant to submit the recommendations.
So, the chances of them writing a huge recommendations is pretty slim in my opinion. Asking them to adhere to a word limit makes their work even more difficult. It is possible that it might irritate some (thankfully my recommendors were annoyed, but gracious about it).
Another thing that I didn’t understand:
300 words or fewer (3000 character limit) - What does this mean? I have a text which is 2800 characters, but 450 words and another which has 280 words but again about 3200 characters.
What do I ask them to do? Adhere to the word-limit? or Adhere to the character-limit? My recommendors have been very accommodating when I asked them to get the recommendation into the word limit. I personally feel its asking a bit too much from them.
Which brings me to the question on why did Tuck do it? Before I put the blame on the school, I suspect that the root of the problem might be in the application submission software. Ross used embark.com and that was a pleasure to work with while Tuck uses applyyourself.com. I think it might be the software that is putting this restriction on the application. Most schools use applyyourself.com, so I can find out if it is Tuck or the software…
October 18, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Its time the recommenders knew what pain we are undergoing as applicants, don’t you think so ?
)
They have all the right to be annoyed, considering they’re all big shots who haven’t been asked to ‘adhere’ to anything in a while
October 18, 2008 at 10:59 pm
LOL
That might be true, but we don’t want them to flip out on our recos because of the annoyance, do we?
October 18, 2008 at 11:02 pm
One of my recommenders called me up as he was keying in the answers. asking if it was okay if the word-limits are crossed, when character-limits aren’t.
I suggested him to trim down if possible, but not at the cost of content n examples.. As he conveyed to me later, for one of the questions, he did go slightly beyond the limits.. ( I do hope he was talking about the principal strengths question
)
It’s kinda strange that a school like Tuck, which does not enforce any word-limits on the applicants asks the recommendors to limit their answers. I’d recommend not to force the limits on your recommenders too strictly.. Schools r surely not going to penalise u for an extra para of praise that ur recommender puts in..
October 19, 2008 at 12:07 am
That’s logical, but I would prefer some “official” clarification
October 19, 2008 at 12:11 am
I’m in a similar dilemma too…
October 19, 2008 at 12:17 am
I’ve done with my Tuck app. I asked them to take the safe path and as much as possible follow both – The 300 word limit and the 3000 char-limit
October 19, 2008 at 11:51 am
None of my recommenders seemed to have any problem, which means none of their responses crossed 300 words! I hope they have entered more than a sentence for each response (except the weakness one!)
May 18, 2009 at 9:34 am
[...] I have always been miffed with the character-limits on usernames and passwords (for that matter recommendations too). But this time it really pushed me to think innovatively (I hope) to comeup with [...]
October 22, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Let me make my view clear upfront. This is not a post saying that Mr. Raghunathrao has stated anything wrong. Its just a personal view and one that I think is shared by a lot of the analytical guys. It can happern… but
1. 2800 characters, but 450 words –> 6.2 characters per word.
2. 3200 characters, but 280 words –> 11.43 characters per word.
Is the second case possible unless your recommender used too many spaces and/or hyphens unnecessarily or long words like “uninteresting” “blabbermouth” many times. (I went to http://longwords.org/ and above words are the most commonly used longwords) I just hope your recommender used good adjectives.