Fun story, when I applied to grad schools back in the day and professors still sent sealed paper recommendation letters to mail with your apps (I assume there’s a digital workflow now), Standard practice was to request an extra set for a univ you didn’t intend to apply to...
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... that way you could open the letters and weed out negative ones. These reco letters were an expensive commodity since you couldn’t reasonably expect one from more than 3-4 faculty or more than a 5-8 from each, tops. So you had to sacrifice one set to sanitize the rest.
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Fortunately all my letters were usable and I landed the full-ride scholarship I was hoping for.
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Also grad school apps are/were super expensive if you’re applying from the developing world. As an undergrad, I was living on less than $50/month (tuition/room/board) and apps at $20-$60 apiece were big money. You couldn’t afford to have them poison-pilled by a jerk professor
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