recommendation letters are worthless

I found out after recruitment that my rec writers who did not know me personally actually fact-checked my resume to make sure I wasn't making anything up. They knew people who knew me, and those people eventually told me that they had been called to verify things about me and find out what kind of person I am. Good thing those people had a decent opinion of me. There are plenty of women who are not going to put their name on a rec without doing some digging, both for their own good name and for the sake of their sorority's new member class. Also sometimes sororities receive forms with "do not recommend" on them. There is more that goes on behind the scenes than people who are not actually in a sorority know, or who have not yet been through recruitment as an active. You don't know what's what.

A lot of alumnae will NOT write a rec for a girl that they do not know personally or at least have met in person. I agree that anyone writing a rec for someone based on nothing more than the resume and probably the request came from mama, are completely worthless and should not be done. Others will have different opinions.

My sorority's form has a space on it to say if the rec writer knows the pnm personally or not and asks for a little detail on that. It's better when the rec comes from someone who knows the pnm but if the writer does not know her personally it's not a black mark against the pnm, because at least she tried to get a rec and that tells us that she cares about us. No rec is an easy cut if we're on the fence about someone.

has a box to check whether I know the PNM personally (and for how many years), or if I know her parents, or if she is was recommended to me by a friend, or if I do not know her. I am a teacher and I write a lot of recs- and I know how to write one in a way that shows the chapter that I really want them to consider this girl vs just writing the rec as a courtesy.