Generally, we can write a single letter. But many schools have made things very complicated, asking for paragraph-long responses to multiple questions, ratings on a number of criteria, etc. It takes a long time to register on multiple systems and get through these if you are writing for many students.

I've checked naviance to see if my senior daughter's recommendation letters are submitted. For both teachers, they submitted the UMD letters pretty early but the other EA school's recommendation has been listed as 'in progress' for quite a while.

I'm not worried, and I'm not complaining. But I am curious. I assumed teachers wrote a single letter and just kind of 'posted' it to each school. But this pattern suggests otherwise (or both would have been shown as 'submitted' at the same time). Is it a lot harder to write/submit letters for some schools than others?

More generally, if we want to make this as easy as possible for teachers, I had assumed it would be better to list all possible regular-decision schools at once, sometime in December, so they could do everything all at once. But if they are doing a non trivial amount of work for each application, it seems better to only request letters when she knows for sure she will be applying to that school.

Thoughts from teachers who participate in this process?