Whether you're writing the LOR yourself for your evaluator or relying on them to say all the right things, writing a letter of recommendation for your PA school application does not have to be one more thing to stress about- if you know how to do it effectively.
As you may or may not know, the LOR is one out of the 4 ways in which CASPA evaluates students for soft skills- or skills that cannot be taught or quantified, such as reliability and confidence just to name two.
For us evaluators, once you add us to the CASPA portal to write you a recommendation, they ask us to evaluate you on a graded scale for the following 8 very specific soft skills. These are:
Intellectual ability
Interpersonal relationships
Oral communication
Reaction to criticism
Reliability
Self-Awareness
Team Skills
Written communication.
Armed with this knowledge, we can extrapolate that these are the skills they care to know most about the student in question.
So now the job to write a LOR becomes a bit clearer, now that we know exactly what things
they want to know about the student.
Here is a free, editable template you can use that takes all of this into consideration.
Tips
Do edit the template to make it more specific and personal.
Do give short and specific examples of how the student demonstrated possessing these skills to you to make it more effective.
Do make it a page or less to be concise.
Do proofread and use spell check.
Best of Luck!