Signature On Recommendation Letter: Fill & Download for Free

Because you, the applicant, are never supposed to see the letters.Admissions committees want to see candid evaluations of applicants. Many letter writers would naturally feel uncomfortable offering any critical comments, no matter how inconsequential, if they knew that the applicant would read them.Also, some recommendation letters offer useful direct comparisons with other past applicants. (“I would rate XXX’s potential for success is stronger than YYY, who is already in your PhD program, but perhaps slightly weaker than ZZZ, who finished his PhD at Stanford last year.”) But these comparative evaluations are confidential; the writer’s opinion of those other people is none of your business.Finally, as Tony’s answer suggests, because there is intense competition for graduate school admissions, and some people try to cheat the system. Allowing you to upload the letters yourself gives you a golden opportunity to cheat the system, by altering the letters before scanning, or by forging the supposed recommender’s signature on a letter you’ve written yourself. Some applicants would take advantage of that opportunity, and a few of them would even succeed, robbing more qualified and more honest applicants.

Neither!You seem to be under the mistaken impression the letters of recommendation are paper documents. At least in the US, actual paper recommendation letters haven’t been the norm for at least twenty years. Letters of recommendation are almost always electronic files, usually in .docx or.pdf format, which are submitted electronically by their authors—most often by uploading them to a web site, but sometimes via email. There is no need to print the letter.Not even to sign it. Nobody cares if recommendation letters are actually signed. The authenticity of the letter is guaranteed by the fact that the author uploaded it themselves. But most of the letters I read are signed electronically (using a scanned image of the writer’s actual signature, not that fancy Adobe stuff).In principle, one could write a recommendation letter by hand on paper and then scan it, or even write it by hand on a tablet computer. But I’ve never seen a letter written that way.

[A2A]What is this “printing” of which you speak? I’ve written on average about a dozen recommendation letters every year for the last 20 years. I honestly don’t remember the last time I submitted a recommendation letter on paper.I write all my recommendation letters (for graduate school, postdocs, faculty positions, tenure, promotion, visas, etc, etc) on my laptop, using a template that looks like believable university letterhead (even though it looks nothing like the university’s official letterhead). For the sake of tradition, I include an image of my signature in the electronic file. Then I either email or upload the resulting PDF file to its destination, depending on the instructions I’m given.None of this requires me to be physically on campus, or even in the same hemisphere as campus; all I need is a reliable internet connection to submit the letter. And nobody has ever complained that my letters aren’t official enough.