Perceived Effects of Exaggeration in Recommendation Letters

Abstract

Outlining the dilemma is easy: pleasant, enthusiastic student asks you for a recommendation supporting her application for a job at a television station. The student earned a C in your broadcast journalism class and a C+ in your media and society class, suggesting same intelligence, diligence, and motivation, but certainly not as much as many others demonstrated. The student shows you a resume that lists employment as a motel night clerk for three years, and two months at the campus radio station, sound evidence of motivation to finish college, but not compelling evidence of commitment to her field. Another dilemma: colleague whom you like, but don't particularly respect as a teacher, has been denied tenure in your program and is seeking employment elsewhere. He has a reputation far organizing his classes poorly (e.g., for returning papers late, making major assignments late in the term, and being unprepared for class), for shirking committee obligations, for dumping large jobs on the staff and imposing same-day deadlines, and for creating emergencies for others through his own incompetence. The colleague asks you to recommend him for a job he desperately needs if he is to remain in teaching. These dilemmas are not unusual. College and university faculty members frequently are asked to write recommendation letters, and the circumstances are sometimes difficult, in part because the letters are so important, according to Smith, who has written and read hundreds of recommendation letters and who has observed that writing and reading all those letters are essential aspects of our jobs, important to shaping our professions, institutions, and students' lives.1 Inflation is one of the major difficulties with recommendation letters, Smith; Miller and Van Rybroek; and Range, Menyhert, Walsh, Hardin, Ellis and Craddick reported.2 Exaggeration is a problem partly because inflating accomplishments seems to have no harmful effect, Bok suggested: In the harsh competition for employment and advancement, such a gesture is natural. It helps someone, while injuring no one in particular ... .3 However, inflated recommendations are harmful in many ways. First, some applicants for jobs, scholarships, graduate programs, internships, faculty development leaves, or fellowships have an unfair advantage over other applicants because they can submit exaggerated recommendations, as Beller and Stoll observed.4 faculty member who inflated a recommendation for the student-night clerk, for example, might see her get a job over a better candidate simply because the faculty member inflated an evaluation. Second, inflated recommendations tend to force others to inflate their recommendations in a continuing spiral of dishonesty. Bok described the problem quite well: Take, for instance, a system where all recommendations given to students are customarily exaggerated - where, say, 60 percent of all graduates are classified as belonging to the top 10 percent. If a professor were to make the honest statement to an employer that a student is merely among the top 60 percent, he might severely injure that student's ability to find work, since the statement would not be taken at face value but would be wrongly interpreted to mean that his real standing was very near the bottoms5. For many faculty members, the dangers of an inflated recommendation are outweighed by the danger to an individual of an honest assessment. Unfortunately, inflated recommendations, Smith said, may harm the stronger students more than the weaker students. A member of my department once expressed to me his frustration that the prevalence of superlatives made it impossible to make anyone believe how good a certain student of ours actually was, he wrote.6 Third, those who inflate recommendations sometimes are embarrassed when the exaggeration is exposed. Suppose the faculty member writes for the untenureable colleague a recommendation that praises his teaching as outstanding. …