The college and career platform Naviance recently unveiled a new tool for teachers—an AI helper that can draft a letter of recommendation for a student in seconds.
With the tool, teachers select a student’s name and Naviance builds a letter based on information in the student’s profile—requiring no additional information from teachers, not even the subject they teach. Teachers can add details, edit the recommendation directly, or even ask the AI assistant to change the tone of the letter to a variety of options from formal to casual. The tool also allows them to emphasize different values, like academics, resilience, or leadership.
Junior Shayna Sann opposes the tool saying, “Rec letters are more than what appears on paper and AI doesn’t know me personally or interact [with] me on a daily basis like my teachers do.” She added that “if I’m asking a teacher to write me a letter of rec that means I really respect and value them, so I’d be hurt if they used AI.”
Senior Amanda Chau emphasized that “it lacks the ability to provide personal details about students and their circumstances/performance in class, which is the whole point of a letter of recommendation.”
Senior Will Nichols expressed similar opposition to this saying, “We spend months/years building relationships with teachers and then for that relationship to be interpreted by AI in the click of the button is insane.”
From a teacher perspective, many teachers seem equally opposed to this AI tool.
Social Studies teacher Michelle Bollinger said that while she’s “not opposed to the use of AI in schools in an absolute sense,” she is opposed to the tool because “it undermines the character of the student-teacher relationship.” She pointed out that teachers “observe growth and accomplishment, and the letters are one of the few places where we can address some of the more subjective things that make a student unique.”
Science teacher Daniela Munoz agreed, saying that while “it could be helpful in creating a structure for yourself if you don’t have a lot of experience writing letters, going ahead and using the verbiage and content is awful.” She highlighted how “you’re offloading to a machine that removes the human aspect which is the whole point of the rec letter.”
Bollinger said “students have a right to know they could be talked about like a bot is talking about them” and that “the school needs to set guidelines to follow on this type of thing and say we aren’t going to use these types of AI.”
Munoz also added that she has heard from colleagues that “admissions are running the letters that teachers are sending through AI checkers, and if they are flagged, they may not be used.”
Bollinger first noticed this tool in October when she was going to write rec letters for other students. At first, she says she “didn’t click on it because I was writing letters for other students and didn’t want to accidentally use it for those students.”
However, in collaboration with The Beacon, Bollinger used an anonymous test student’s account to write various rec letters using the Naviance AI tool. In order to write these letters, the AI tool was not given any extra information on the student, simply the data it already had in the system. If you are interested in reading those letters, please scan the QR code.
This tool comes at a time when many teachers are already using AI tools to create lesson plans and students are using those same tools to complete many of their assignments. Sann says that while “I don’t use AI that much, only if I’m really confused on something, I know a lot of my classmates do and it’s really pervasive through the school.”
Munoz has also noticed widespread AI usage, saying that even though “AI is not that helpfu for the way we design questions” she still sees, “it used for certain tasks and questions unfortunately.”
Munoz pointed specifically to Grammarly AI as being the most pervasive as it “can rewrite, brainstorm, and improve writing, so exactly all the things we want our students to be able to do independently to become real scholars.” •