School wants another LOR

[prolix]

Hey everyone! It's my first post - I'll skip the introductions and get to the good stuff (or not so good stuff... I'm not quite sure)!

So I received an email the other day from a member of the adcom at one of my desired grad schools. The person informed me that one of my recommenders only sent an objective sheet rather than an objective sheet plus an actual letter. As a result, the person asked me if I could send a fourth.

When I inquired as to whether or not the personalized letter should come from the same person or the new one, the person told me that it would be great if I could obtain a letter from a different person.

Luckily, I managed to snag one of my professors with whom I'm taking an individual study course, but all this leads me to wonder...

Do they want a fourth LOR because they're interested in me, or do they just simply not want to look at my application without that fourth letter (keep in mind the initial requirements were only 3 LORs)?

Thanks for the input in advance fellow "wait"-ers!

[LJK]

My guess, and it is a guess, is that they must be somewhat interested to ask you to go to the trouble of getting another letter. They would be able to tell if they were not interested from your admissions materials that included just two letters. They are probably looking for the third to see if they can get a better idea of whether you should stand out from the other qualified candidates. I would think its a positive sign that you are being considered but that does not mean that with your extra letter you will stand out. Hopefully you do though! Good Luck.

[thom1820]

Hm...of course I know nothing but I'd think it's positive. Schools get so many applications, it seems unlikely that they'd be like, "oh, one of our hundreds of applicants is missing a piece of their application! We must track them down so they complete it and we have another application to read!" If they weren't interested, they'd be more likely to just reject you due to the incomplete application. So I'm thinking they have read what you have and liked it and want it to be 100% complete so they can accept you. This might be overly optimistic, but that is my opinion.

[OnceAndFutureGrad]

I wrote about this elsewhere but I'll repeat it here. In 2009, I was contacted by my current school to clarify something I wrote on the application, and at first I was really worried but, as it turned out, they wanted the clarification because I was on the short list. Whew! It's not a sure sign, but I'd say it's a good sign that they want more information about you.