London Business School performs reference verification checks for all of the admitted students. This year they sent e-mails to recommenders in the end of July.To my mind this is strange because of two things:
1) July-August are holiday months, so most people are away and unable to reply promptly.
2) It's too late to perform any actual checks. Suppose they find something about someone - and the person has already paid a big amount of fees, resigned from job, got visa, moved to London...
This process is not advertised and I only discoverd that because one of my recommenders had changed a job, so his e-mail was no longer valid and I got a request of his current address from admission officer. I submitted the new e-mail and of course wrote\called all of my four recommenders.
You may wonder why am I talking about four recommenders while the school requires just two recommendations? And no, my recommenders don't do extreme programming ;) (for eXtreme Programmers a common practice is to work in pairs). I got two recommenders last year and two more the year before that. That's probably why some schools do not like reapplicants - they have to perform double amount of checks on them :)
Two recommenders replied to the school, before they got my e-mails.
Two others returned from holidays, made a heroic attempt to scan their "in" and "spam" folders (you may imagine how many letters a high-level manager would have after two or three weeks away) and... haven't found anything LBS-confirmation-related there. Both of them were the recent recommenders... you see the pattern too, don't you?
So I wrote to admission officer asking [for trouble] her whether the remaining confirmations were needed, and she sent the long-awaited e-mails. Hopefully the replies will fly back next Monday - the same day when I head to London myself.
