Graduate schools the country over have the peculiar and annoying custom of asking for letters of recommendation from the instructors of hopeful applicants. When this concerns Harvard and other large colleges it is a useless gesture with no relation to reality.

Letters of recommendation in general and character references in particular are usually meaningless, and when an undergraduate has to ask an overworked professor, to whom he is scarcely known by name, for a letter of recommendation, the matter reaches a point of absurdity. Of course, the undergraduate can approach the problem more conscientiously and go to some section man he had two years before, or to his adviser or tutor. In most cases, however, if the instructor is still at Harvard, he has to refer to the student's official transcript, which the graduate school will have in any case.

No doubt the procedure may be helpful to a graduate school in the instance of small colleges, but the schools should recognize the futile waste of time involved in obtaining letters from instructors of large institutions. The student has the often embarrassing task of finding instructors qualified to write letters for him; then the instructor has the choice of writing hypocritical jargon or taking the time to look up the student's record (which normally gives no indication of "integrity" or "study habits"); and finally the graduate school plods through miles of red tape to see that the letters are read and filed.

Despite the headaches and heartaches that go into the preparation of these letters, most graduate schools decide primarily on the quality of the grades even if they get a hundred letters of recommendation. Harvard should join forces with a number of other large colleges and let the graduate schools know the situation, bringing an end to this patent waste of everyone's time.