Professor Recommendation Form: Fill & Download for Free

[Assuming this is for applications for graduate school or faculty positions in the US.]You can, of course, but you REALLY shouldn’t. At best, this is unethical. At worst, this could be considered fraud, and it could mean your automatic rejection.When a department sends a link to a professor, they are providing the professor and only the professor access to their application system. Not the professor’s postdoc or secretary or wife or bulldog, and certainly not the student for whom they wrote the requested letter.In the US, by default, all graduate-school applicants have a legal right to read their own recommendation letters. But almost all recommendation forms give the student to waive that right, and if the student does not waive those rights, their letters are taken much less seriously. For faculty applications, the ethical boundary is even stronger. Job applicants generally do not have the right to read their own recommendation letters, except possibly in the extremely rare instance of a lawsuit.Search committees want to believe that your letter-writers are giving their brutally honest assessment of your skills and potential, and we all know that it’s much harder to be brutally honest to people to their face.(The only thing worse than a student reading their own recommendation letters is a student writing their own recommendation letter. Fortunately, we can almost always tell when that happens.)

In the US, professors do not charge students for writing recommendation letters nor do they expect to receive gifts for doing so — it is simply part of their job to write such letters. Moreover, anyone who has reached faculty rank has had many individuals write recommendations for them along the way; it is appropriate for faculty to repay that assistance by supporting students and junior colleagues who need letters of recommendation.A professor is expected to tell a student, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether or not they can write a letter for the student. Examples of reasons for declining to write would include that they do not know the student well enough, that they do not think they could write a strong enough letter to be helpful, or that they will be traveling (or unusually busy) at the time of the deadline.Additionally, a professor should not complain to the student about the annoying aspects of writing letters and filling out web-based recommendation forms. Instead, the professors complain privately to one another about this, just as they share horror stories about the quality of the coffee in the faculty break room.Given what you’ve said about your conversation with this professor, it would probably be best just to ask someone else for the letter.

I would very much doubt an error on her part regarding her own position would adversely affect you in any way. It’s possible, I suppose, but pretty far-fetched - apart from anything else, usage of that term varies very much between countries, so her job title (in the US, for example) would actually be Professor anyway! Which country was this in, and what sort of recommendation form?