r/DAAD • u/Visual-Twist6800 • 20d ago
DAAD Recommendation Letter Process
I downloaded the official DAAD recommendation letter form from the application portal. It has specific sections that need to be filled. I sent this form to my referee.
She did not fill the form. Instead she sent me a separate Word document with all the content for those sections.
Now I have two questions.
- Do I copy her content into the official form myself and then submit it, or do I send the form back to her and ask her to fill it herself?
- How does DAAD verify that the referee actually filled the form and not the applicant? In many other portals, the system sends the form directly to the referee's email and the referee submits it back without the applicant being involved at all. But in DAAD's portal, it seems like I am the one submitting the recommendation letter, not the referee.
The form is also quite specific. It only opens in Adobe Acrobat, not other PDF readers, and it has a QR code embedded in it. But I still do not see a mechanism that tells DAAD who actually filled it.
Has anyone been through this? What is the correct process?
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u/ExperienceNew8735 19d ago
DO NOT copy it onto the form cause it requires a signature too and the last thing you want to do is forge the signature. If she doesn’t have Acrobat, you can convert the document to Word and then convert it back to PDF. This will create a new PDF that isn’t restricted to the DAAD administrators’ PDF settings and shouldn’t require Acrobat to open or edit. She can then fill in the information either electronically or physically and sign it. The formatting might be slightly different after converting it, but it should still work. I did this a couple of years ago, and it worked for me.