It’s college application season, and as students submit their applications and hope for the best, their teacher letters of recommendation help boost their confidence. This year, Naviance, South’s platform for college applications, has added a new AI feature. Teachers can now click “compose” to have AI generate a letter of recommendation.
English teacher Sandra McCue was alarmed by this addition and decided to experiment with how it works. She does not intend to use it for her real recommendation letters, though.
“It gave very basic inputs, like, ‘do you want your letter to sound more casual or more formal?,’ [but] it didn’t ask me anything about the student really,” McCue said. “Then it composed this obnoxiously long letter, and it made up all these details.”
As an English teacher, McCue gets many requests to write letters of recommendation. She emphasizes the importance of adding “a personal touch” to otherwise impersonal applications full of test scores and extracurriculars.
“It’s really disheartening that the thing that is supposed to be this big company that takes care of all this is just offering this up on a silver platter,” McCue said. “I don’t think that they consulted with the colleges. I bet the colleges don’t want this.”
Nowadays, English teachers are quite familiar with AI used in writing. McCue sees it all the time and is rather accustomed to its presence.
“As somebody who reads writing all day long, your own words and your own voice tell a part of the story that I think would be missing if you tried to replicate that with AI,” McCue said.
English teachers aren’t the only ones with letters to write. Math teacher Amanda Orban is happy to be writing letters, but as a math teacher, it doesn’t come as easily to her.
“It does take a while to write a letter of recommendation for a kid,” Orban said. “I want to make sure that for that kid, I’m doing my best to make it about them and not about what a computer generated for them.”
On the flip side, students also have notions about this new feature on Naviance. Helena Tabaczuk ’26, who has already asked for her letter, is quite surprised by this action from Naviance.
“I think I’ve just thought of it as the website that contains everything needed for college, and you and your teachers have to manually upload information,” Tabaczuk said. “I guess I never really thought about it possibly having AI features.”
McCue and Orban both mentioned how obvious AI additions in writing are to the trained eye. Tabaczuk wonders how college admissions officers may be able to detect these AI composed letters.
“I believe they could be more harmful because if an admissions counselor believes a teacher’s writing is false or not true to them, it could have an impact on the students application and could jeopardize their chances of getting into a school,” Tabaczuk said. “The point of the letter is to present the student’s best qualities, something only a teacher can describe with their own experience.”
