UC Berkeley to begin taking letters of recommendation
The University of California, Berkeley’s new freshman application policy, announced in April, will start going into effect this fall and allows invited students to optionally submit up to two letters of recommendation. UC Berkeley is the first and only school in the UC system to adopt this policy.
“(Previously UC Berkeley) had decided they didn’t need a letter of recommendation because they’ve gone off the personal statement, ACT/SAT, and GPA,” Rick Napora, counselor, said. “I think Berkeley is going in the direction of needing something that’s like a tiebreaker for especially gifted students, so they give those students an opportunity to collect a letter from someone who knows them well to add another dimension.”
Napora believes that the university is trying to “level the playing field” for students who don’t have the highest traditional grade and testing scores because it is the most competitive UC. Indeed, according to Berkeley News, only about 13,000 freshmen were admitted out of nearly 79,000 applicants this year, making its 17% acceptance rate one of the lowest in the UC system along with UC Los Angeles’s.
On their freshman application policy page, the school states that they adopted the letters as a part of their “belief in the value of holistic review” and specifically asks the letters to focus on “academic performance, love of learning, leadership, persistence, cross-cultural engagement, originality, and demonstrat(ing) concern for others.”
The letters of recommendations are to be one page long and are due at midnight on Jan. 15; they are not a part of the UC online application itself, but an invitation to submit them will be emailed to students in November.
