Pulp fiction – or the art of writing university references

You wouldn’t immediately associate university counsellors with creative writing. Famous authors of fiction who were also university counsellors? No names spring to mind immediately. 

Yet when it comes to the reference-writing season, creativity comes to the fore. Constructing a profile of a student that highlights strengths while at the same time maintaining an honest relationship with the university requires all the skills of a Pulitzer winner.

1. Writing the reference

The key question to ask ourselves is: What is the purpose of the reference? From the school management’s point of view, it might be to ensure that students get headline offers from top universities. The student and parent perspectives are broadly similar to this, albeit on a much more personal level. Meanwhile, what the universities are hoping for is an honest assessment of the student’s suitability for their chosen course or university. 

So, how to balance these? Here are some points to consider:

What’s in a word?

“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
- Humpty Dumpty, in Alice in Wonderland

One approach when suggesting areas of weakness is to use coded messages, which universities can pick up on. A student who pays little attention to his teachers might be described as “adopting a very self-motivated attitude to his work”. And we will all be familiar with “thoughtful” as a description of the student who is reluctant to contribute. 

A few others:

Organised: achieves very little because he/she spends most of the time arranging and rearranging files, underlining words in coloured pens and rewriting notes

Enthusiastic: disrupts lessons through attention-seeking

Enjoys lab work: a danger to him/herself and fellow students during chemistry practical work

Participates in a wide range of school activities: gives up after the first session and signs up for another activity on a regular basis

Creative thinker: can’t concentrate on the task at hand for more than five minutes

Follows advice: no motivation, initiative or interest

Will continue to make progress if…: making no progress whatsoever

Mind the gap

“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” 
Benjamin Franklin

Often when writing a reference, what is unsaid can carry the most weight. This can come in many forms, such as:

• Glowing testaments in two A-level or IB HL subjects, but no comments on the third. Does this indicate inconsistency or an area of weakness?
• Comments that focus on students’ attitudes to their studies (enjoyment, collaboration, willingness, enthusiasm as examples) but little mention of understanding or academic achievement. Are there issues that might affect future studies?
• Conversely, lots of data about academic achievement but no mention of study skills such as independent research, problem solving or critical thinking. Does the student rely on rote learning? Will he/she cope with university-level studies?

Too much of a good thing

“Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.” 
- Anne Bradstreet

So far, I have only discussed negatives. Counsellors also have to be creative when writing about students who excel in all areas. In particular, trying not to overload the reference with superlatives or grab the thesaurus to find 10 different adjectives that mean “excellent”. One solution here is to illustrate their achievements or contributions using examples: phrases such as “…for example, in biology…” are helpful.

2. Teaching the teachers

Reference-writing should be a collaborative enterprise. Schools will have their own procedures for requesting references from teachers. Teachers, as they often remind us, are very busy, and reference-writing may not be top of their list of priorities. 

As counsellors, we are very aware of the differing purposes of school reports – which comment on current performance and suggest how to make progress – and of university references, which address the students’ suitability for their chosen courses. But this distinction is not always appreciated by teachers, and so careful and sensitive guidance is important. 

In my experience, there is always a subsection of academic staff who fully engage with the reference-writing process and who go the extra mile in producing comprehensive and beautifully structured references or letters of support. The easy path is to rely on their submissions and to use them as the bulk of the reference. 

The danger with this is that the references can become unbalanced by focusing on one or two subjects and, as discussed above, this can send (false) warning signs to universities. So a better strategy is to use these references as exemplar material for guidance or training when starting the reference process each year.

3. Cautionary tales

A few years ago, I was involved in UK medical school admissions and was able to read a significant number of Ucas references from international applications. While references from international students who were familiar with the requirements were as helpful as those from UK students, there were issues with references from a number of schools that, for whatever reason, had not fully understood what was required. For example:

• One centre wrote an almost identical reference for all its applicants, which opened with: “In all my years dealing with university applications, I can honestly say that this is the most outstanding and worthy student I have ever had the pleasure of teaching…” Thus, the reference was worthless and would almost certainly have had a negative effect on the students’ applications.
• A number of the references commented only on the students’ personalities, characters, enthusiasm and relationships with their peers and teachers. While well-written, they did not address the students’ academic strengths or suitability for studying medicine. Again, these did not help in supporting their students for UK applications.

4. Research

From the horse’s mouth

For counsellors who are new to reference writing, lots of useful resources are available. Good starting points, it goes without saying, are the universities. Here are some examples:

London School of Economics

Imperial College London

Caltech

Other resources

Common App guide

Ucas guide

Examples of bad references

Using generative AI

Generating templates for references using ChatGPT or similar can streamline the process, and can help in getting sample references or letters of support. The quality and usefulness of these depends, of course, on the prompts used. The minimum information needed to produce something meaningful includes:

• Details of the target universities and, if applicable, courses applied for
• Profile of a typical student (not personal details of individual students): age, nationality, study programme, interests, achievements
• Background of your school
• Who the reference is from, word count, preferred style of writing

Producing a template or examples can be a useful starting point, but trying to generate the actual reference will result in a very generic and bland document, which will lack essential detail. 

A more effective approach is to ask ChatGPT to suggest the prompts: “What prompts are useful for generating a school counsellor reference for an application to X university for an undergraduate degree in X?”. Then use those prompts to produce the template and add extra detail to personalise it.

If you have your own recommendations on dealing with the reference process, it would be great to hear them.