recommendation week

This week, as the deadlines for next year applications get close, I had to write a dozen of recommendation letters for some of my students. Some of those students I knew well as they were in my english R class or in my graduate courses, but others were unknown to me. The most frustrating emails are those of the kind

Je suis so-and-so et j’ai suivi votre cours de Statistique exploratoire et numérique au premier semestre. Je vous écris ce mail car je souhaiterais postuler l’année prochaine there-and-there. Il m’est demandé de fournir dans mon dossier deux lettres de recommandations, c’est donc pour cela que je vous demande si vous pouvez m’écrire une lettre de recommandation.

(I am so-and-so and I took your course Exploratory and numerical Statistics during the first semester. I am writing this mail because I plan to apply next year to there-and-there. I am required to include two recommendation letters in my application file, this is why I would like to ask you to write a recommendation letter.)

composed as if writing a recommendation letter did not require any information about the recommended student! Or maybe they think I know every one of the 180 of them…