Office of
Health Professions Advising

Deciding Whom to Ask
We will not suggest any particular faculty members as more likely to write positive evaluations, nor will we suggest that you exclude certain faculty as more likely to write unsupportive letters. You are the only one who knows whether your interaction with specific instructors has been positive, negative, or neutral, and the extent to which a faculty member knows you. You should request letters accordingly. It is not the function of the HPA to sanitize an applicant’s File of Evaluations by editing or deleting letters or parts of letters. Confidentiality of letters is maintained at all times unless an applicant has retained his or her access to the letters.

Confidential versus Non-confidential Letters
Admission committees want to know that your letters are confidential, i.e., you have waived your right to see them or have access to them. Through the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (known as FERPA or the Buckley amendment), you have a right to inspect your letter or letters, but we must tell you that it is to your advantage to waive this right.

You should provide each evaluator with a copy of the Evaluation Form; however, before doing so, you should complete the waiver section at the top and sign it. If you do not waive your right to see a letter or if you do not use the form, the letter from that evaluator will be stamped “non-confidential.” Likewise if you do not waive your right to see the health professions advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation (see appropriate section in the myHPA application), it will be stamped “non-confidential.” Please pay attention to these details.

The HPA will not customize letters for each school
The File of Evaluations is a single document and will be transmitted to each of the schools you request (see below). The HPA will not be able to customize letters for sending to individual schools. Exceptions to this regulation are limited to MD/PhD applicants and those applying to both allopathic (MD) and osteopathic (DO) medical schools.

Letters of Evaluation for Making Application to MD/PhD Combined Degree Programs
Application to combined degree programs such as the MD/PhD programs must be accompanied by documentation of the applicant’s special interest in and strengths for those particular programs. While your essay will be used to assess your interests and strengths, your letters of evaluation will go a long way in serving to confirm both. Therefore, those interested in such programs should give particular attention to structuring a File of Evaluations that speaks not only of your interest in medical school, but your interest in research, experience in doing basic research and promise for a career in research. This is best done by those who have seen you in that setting. For MD applicants, the file of letters is limited to 5 letters, plus the Health Professions Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation. However, MD/PhD applicants may include additional research letters. Some MD/PhD programs will require letters from every research experience in which you have participated.

The Health Professions Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation
Most undergraduate institutions have a designated Health Professions Advising Committee or Advisor. The role of the advisor may be quite different in a large state university than it is at a school like Duke. At Duke and many other small to mid-sized universities and small liberal arts colleges, in addition to providing academic and career advice before and during application to the professional schools, the Committee/Advisor has the responsibility of evaluating candidates and writing letters of evaluation in behalf of applicants. You may request a Health Professions Advisor Committee Letter of Evaluation. The HPA does not require that it’s advisees include the Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation in their File of Evaluations and this is made clear to the Admissions Committees; however, most of the professional schools expect it and a few require that current students and recent applicants have a letter from a health professions advisor (e.g., Duke, Johns Hopkins). Others may not require it but will ask you to explain why you do not have a letter.

The health professions advisors will write evaluations for Duke applicants who make that request and who meet the requirements as described below. Essentially all senior applicants do make this request. The situation is frequently different for delayed applicants with significant work experience after graduation and/or several non-Duke science courses. Admission committees may consider evaluations from experiences that non-traditional applicants have had since graduation most heavily. Alumni/ae are welcome to use the HPA as a resource to transmit confidential letters of evaluation as long as they meet the deadline for making that request. However, we may not be able to provide the Health Professions Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation for an alum with whom we have not previously worked. If you have any questions regarding this policy, feel free to contact a health professions advisor.

We will draw on the following sources of information when preparing the Health Professions Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation:

• Your academic record and MCAT scores (when available), with attention to both your science GPA (including biology, chemistry, physics, and math courses) and overall GPA in Duke courses, as well as trends in academic performance. These factors, along with your undergraduate course loads and course choices, contribute to the ability to predict success for you in the demanding science curriculum of medical/dental/vet schools.
• Information about your interests and activities, accomplishments and special situations as provided on the myHPA application and other materials in your HPA file. We may also refer to your college records, including citizenship/disciplinary records from the Office of Judicial Affairs.
• Letters of evaluation submitted at your request. These are particularly important to the preparation of a strong Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation for you. We will not write your letter until all others are received because we will draw additional information from them. Therefore, it is important for them to be received by the deadline of June 1 in order to avoid delays.
• The information in and the quality of your personal essay.
• Advising appointments including the required interview appointment during spring semester in the year of the application.

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If you plan to request the Health Professions Advisor’s Committee Letter of Evaluation, you will need to submit your completed myHPA profile (profile and personal essay) and meet with a health professions advisor during the spring term. Students who plan to study abroad in the spring may schedule their appointments before they leave, or after they return until June 1. Or a phone interview can be arranged.

A special note to Duke graduate students and employees: Medical schools and other health professions schools expect that, if you use a health professions advising office to prepare and submit your letters, it will be the office of your primary undergraduate institution. They will evaluate your application in light of that institution and expect the health professions advisor to evaluate your credentials in comparison with other graduates of that particular college or university. For this reason, the Duke HPA does not work individually with Duke graduate students and/or employees unless they earned their undergraduate degree at Duke. However, those individuals are welcome to attend our group sessions, obtain our literature, and use the library of resources available in our office.

Use of Evaluations
When you request an evaluation from an individual, you should make that person aware that the letter is to be used for the purposes of your application to one of the health professions schools, and you should identify the type of school on the Evaluation Form. The author of the letter has this in mind when composing the text of the letter. It would be inappropriate to use these letters for any other purpose. Therefore, with two exceptions, the HPA will not transmit your File of Evaluations or any evaluation being held in your file to a type of school not identified to the evaluator at the time the evaluation was written, nor will the HPA transmit your letters to the Career Center or a prospective employer. We will not be able to send the letters to graduate schools (including schools of public health), prospective employers, etc.
The exceptions are the following: 1) We will send the Committee Letter of Evaluation to official post baccalaureate prehealth programs. These are established programs that provide enrichment for applicants who are not yet strong candidates for admission to health professions schools. If you have on file in the HPA letters recommending you for medical school, you may use them for post-bac programs. However, they are inappropriate for regular graduate school programs. On the other hand, it may be to your advantage to ask for letters specifically recommending you to a post baccalaureate program rather than to medical, dental, or veterinary school. 2) At your request, the HPA will send your premedical evaluations to certain appropriate health professions scholarship programs that select their candidates on the basis of the strength of those evaluations. Generally this is done only after you have received an offer of acceptance to a school. We are not able to send the letters to small scholarship programs unknown to us. Please remember that faculty and others have entrusted the HPA with these letters and we have assured the letter writers that their confidentiality will be protected and the letters will only be used for the program indicated by the applicant.

Does Duke Use a “Committee Letter”?
When individual schools request that you submit your letters of evaluation, they may ask if you will be having a “Committee Letter of Evaluation” or individual letters sent. In fact, we use a hybrid system in which almost all applicants will have a letter from a health professions advisor (the “Committee Letter”) but a copy of each of your individual letters of evaluation is also included. If you are asked to designate in what form your letter will be received, you should answer “Committee Letter/Letter Packet ”. The question is relatively moot for Duke anyway since all medical schools and most dental schools know what to expect from a Duke applicant who uses the HPA.

Transmission of Letters of Evaluation to Schools
In recent years, we have been transmitting files of letters of evaluation digitally to medical schools through electronic means. For the 2009 application cycle, the HPA at Duke will continue to use VirtualEvals. The advantage to applicants is that transmitting letters via VirtualEvals is more efficient, faster, and more secure than conventional means. You will receive additional information on how letters will be transmitted in the May Update published by the HPA. We have received highly enthusiastic responses about VirtualEvals from medical schools. In addition, you are notified by email when your letters are transmitted by our office to VirtualEvals and another email when the medical schools download your letters.

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