6/6/2023 0 Comments Email faux pas![]() ![]() If they are not, then personally I would not send an email to them about the student, not necessarily out of ethical considerations, but because I would expect sending an email to make no difference to the student's outcome. I don't think these colleagues are on the selection committee of the internship program Sending a letter to sabotage a student is another matter entirely, of course. How the letter is received and any ethical decisions are up to the recipient and the committee. It is more like "There is more to see with this student than you might expect." It can have an effect or not. ![]() So it isn't a case of "I'd like you to do me a favor, though.". The committee may only be able to look at official communications and needs to be fair to all applicants. My own reputation there was in question until we learned the truth of it. None of us knew at the time that he was dying of AIDS. I personally recommended another student to a different top school and he was accepted but did terribly. My letter just caused them to take a second look and they were happy they did. His is now a professor in CS at a top school. The letter was to someone at a top school. One was excellent in all dimensions except, being an immigrant brought up in a different culture, did rather poorly on standardized exams. I've done something similar for a couple of students, though related to graduate admissions. You are putting your own reputation on the line, of course. I suppose that opinions can differ, but I find it entirely appropriate to send a supporting letter to people you know. To summarize, I personally think sending the email is ethically reasonable and not a faux pas as long as you truly believe in your student being a highly meritorious candidate, and don’t suggest that the decision regarding whether the student is accepted should factor in your personal friendship with the people you’re sending the email to. This is the utilitarian view commonly taken in many trolley-type situations. But one can reasonably argue that you are simply helping the department use its scarce attention more efficiently, and in this way are helping it get a better admission outcome overall. Is this action ethical? Well, that depends on your views about trolley problems - these are ethical dilemmas on which people tend to have a broad range of views. So we have a “ trolley problem”-type situation in which your email might divert the department’s attention towards your student (whom you deem very worthy indeed), at the possible cost of “sacrificing” another - statistically, less worthy on average, I’ll assume - applicant whose file won’t get looked at as closely. The only thing that might change is which students end up being the victims of that unfairness. ![]() But to me that unfairness seems intrinsic to the time- and resource-constrained environment in the department running the program, and will exist whether or not you send the informal email asking for your student’s file to be looked at. And indeed, an application process that doesn’t even look at all applications is definitely unfair, since it seems quite likely that it will miss some worthy candidates (maybe even the best candidate). In such an environment, even the mere “benefit” of having one’s application file looked at feels like getting an unfair advantage. The issue in the background here is that we all want application processes to be as meritocratic as possible, but at the same time, a true meritocracy can’t actually be achieved when there are so many application files and the people looking at them have so little time to do their work that the end result is that not all applications actually get seriously looked at. Here’s my analysis of the “please look at this student” email. ![]() But the former action can be viewed as ethical when viewed from certain perspectives. The latter action is definitely unethical. There is a big ethical difference between those two actions IMO. We should distinguish between sending an informal email outside the official LOR channel that says “please look at my student’s application file, it will be worth your time” and sending an email that says “please accept my student as a favor to me”. TLDR: not a faux pas, if done with appropriate tact and consideration of the ethical issues underlying this situation. ![]()
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