4 Recommendations, Submit only 3?

[aunnnn]

Hi, suppose I ask 4 letters for the recommendation (three required, one for safety). And as expected, only 3 letters were done in deadline.

The question is: Should I leave the last pending letter request in the application system?

E.g., would it look bad to have one pending letter shown in the system, in spite of three completed letters? (Thus I should cancel the pending request.)

Or I can leave it there just in case the last recommender submit it, and adcom would not care about that and just pick those three for reviewing anyway.

[fuzzylogician]

Most platforms I know won't let you rescind a pending request, nor change any recommender details once you've entered them into the system.. as long as you have three letters, you should be good. I don't think anyone's going to worry about the fourth one. As a general rule, if it'll add to your application, you might as well hope it makes it. If it's not as strong as the others, you could try and rescind, but you should also ask yourself why you asked for it in the first place!

[Carly Rae Jepsen]

This is my first time applying so don't take my word on anything, but I submitted 4 LORs for a couple programs I was very interested in. Neither of those programs advised against it, and I figured if someone was late with their LOR then I could rest assured I had the other 3 ready anyway. (Let's see how this works out).