Isn’t this a revolting development?
I’ve just finished submitting some web-based recommendations for a student applying to graduate school. The student is terrific; the web-based recommendation system is decidely not terrific. I really hope it doesn’t catch on the current form. The system seems to be produced by a company called “Apply Yourself”
and they really haven’t applied themselves to making a system that faculty are going to be willing to use. It’s fine for one student applying to one school, but that’s not what most faculty members have to deal with. For example, even though all the schools used the same software, they still asked me to type all my contact information into their little boxes every time. Stanford’s wanted 750-character answers to a set of questions (but I could, and did, just upload the letter I’d written), and in general it’s an example of just how bad web-based data-entry systems can be.
On the other hand, I suspect that this will be the basis for an improvement in the recommendation process, eventually. What’s strange, though, is that this company seems to have already given up the main advantage that they have—that they could be a central place where recommenders registered their contact informatin (ONCE) and then moved on to a list of students and schools for/to whom they would prepare recommendations.
Even better, they could convince the schools to standardize the check-boxes that everyone seems to use.
My former boss one summer when I worked at IBM used to talk about “insurmountable opportunities.” It will be interesting to see what becomes of this one.