Rao Yi: Professors Should Write Recommendation Letters Themselves

The fallout of Professor Stearns' letter continues. Peking University reports that Professor and Dean Rao Yi and a vice president of the university met with Stearns to discuss the issues raised in his letter.

Professor Stearns is happy with the progress and suggested that the school should their actions from two aspects:

1. When professors are asked to provide recommendation letters for their students, they should not just let the students write the letters for them to sign.
2. The school should require professors to teach with their own understandings of their class material, not just read out existing textbooks. If the professors are lazy in such a way, the students would learn to cheat by copying as well.

For many years, it has been a well known and common practice that most professors in China don't write recommendations for their students. They just ask the students to have them written and then sign whatever that were presented to them. Some do this out of lack of confidence in their English language skills, but most do it simply because they are not interested in investing the time and effort in this "mundane" task.

Rao Yi acknowledges this problem. He said that he was well aware of it when he was in charge of admitting graduate students at his institutes in the United States. Rao Yi agrees that there should be no reason for professors asking their students to write their own recommendation letters. They should write themselves, or at least ask their secretaries or assistants for help.