Thank you for acting as a professional referee for an applicant to the University of Cambridge. High-quality references are much appreciated and help us decide which applicants will benefit most from our courses.
The information below describes what we need from you and what we're looking for in a reference. Following this guidance will maximise the value of your reference to ourselves and to the student concerned.
If you're unable to supply a reference for the applicant, or cannot meet the timetable, please let the applicant know as soon as possible so they can nominate another referee.
What do I need to provide?
Our reference request has three parts.
1) Your details
You are asked to give your name, your role and organisation when you knew the applicant directly, and how long that was for. This helps us interpret your comments.
2) Specific questions
You are asked to answer three short, specific questions. For each, your response is given by selecting one of a short set of categories. These questions cover:
- the applicant’s intellectual ability demonstrated in their professional role. You're also asked to briefly describe your professional position at the relevant time. If you're unable to rate the student, you're given an opportunity to explain why. Please give some details of the capacity in which you oversaw the applicant’s work and your judgement on it.
- the applicant’s potential for originality, creativity and independence of thinking, based on their work when you knew them.
- the applicant’s suitability for the course given their professional experience. The name of the course and a link to further details are on the first page (‘overview’) of the referee portal.
3) Reference letter
You are asked to provide a letter of reference or recommendation. Please focus on the applicant’s abilities, experiences and skills, and how these are relevant to their proposed course.
A reference will be most useful to us, and to the applicant, if you're able to give specific examples of projects or tasks they have conducted and the results they have achieved.
A reference of 500 to 1,000 words is most effective. Longer references will not give additional help to the student.
If possible, we ask you to comment on the following specific areas. It is helpful, but not necessary, to cover these in order. We recommend that you use these as headings in the reference letter.
- The applicant’s intellectual characteristics: their intellectual curiosity and their abilities in critical thinking, analytical reasoning and coherent argument, as well as any relevant technical competence.
- The applicant’s motivation: their persistence when faced with challenges and their drive to complete set tasks, including their proposed course.
- The applicant’s task and time management, in particular when they are working independently.
- The applicant’s professional effectiveness: their responsiveness to feedback, their capacity for self-reflection and development, and their ability to work and communicate with others in a professional context.
- Your summary view: whether you would want to appoint the applicant to a project team that you were leading.
You may want to consult colleagues who have worked directly with the applicant in drafting a reference.
Please do not name the applicant in your reference or discuss protected characteristics like ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability.
We're looking for references that are specific to an individual course. If an applicant names you as a referee for more than one course, we will need you to complete a separate reference for each.
Submitting your reference
All references are submitted through our referee portal. A link to the portal will be emailed to you when an applicant nominates you as a referee.
The email will give a deadline for submission of your reference. Unfortunately, the student’s application will be withdrawn if this deadline is not met. If the deadline is close, the student has been late in nominating you as a referee. Please contact them directly if this is a problem for you.
The reference letter can be uploaded to the portal or typed directly into a free text box. If you have any technical difficulties, please contact help@postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk.
The reference should be:
- in English
- between 500 and 1,000 words
- a pdf document
- no larger than 2MB
- signed and dated
To help with verification, we ask applicants to provide an email address for professional referees linked to the institution where the referee works.
If you do not have an institutional email address, please provide your full contact details and use your institution’s headed paper for each page of the reference letter. Please include a brief explanation of your role and why an alternative email address is being used.
References are supplied to Cambridge in confidence and, as such, are exempt from the right of access provisions of data protection legislation (UK GDPR). References will not be disclosed to the student or to third parties, including other parts of the University of Cambridge.
After submission
We give applicants the ability to send you an automatic reminder letter if your reference has not been received.
We also let applicants know that it can take up to 36 hours for your reference to register for them as submitted. If needed, you can use the link in the request email to check that you have submitted successfully.