Barry, like me, is doing his first tour of duty on a search committee this year. He’s a little more perceptive than me about how to classify reference letters though.

I actually have a reasonably precise question about reference letters. What is the function f such that when someone whom one does not know says that X is the best grad student they have seen in the last n years, f(n) is the largest number y such that it is reasonable to believe X is the best graduate student they have seen in the last y years? My initial inclination was to guess that f(n) was something like n/2, but I’m starting to think it should be non-linear, maybe something like the square root of n.

I assume that given the hyperbolic conventions of reference letters, it isn’t that plausible to say f is the identity function. Maybe I’m being too cynical here, and that’s exactly what I should believe. Ultimately this doesn’t matter a lot to the search process, because all I’m trying to do is sort the candidates, not make absolute evaluations of them, but it would be interesting to know. Reference-letter-ese is an interesting dialect of English, and one perhaps worthy of study.