My father's advice on writing evaluations.

So I talked with my father for a while about how to write up my one homeschooler's rec, since she isn't doing well in Latin and hasn't mastered basic skills, and my dad has experience with that from having been a high school teacher.

He made 2 good points, after I told him that this would be a general eval for placement later on in classes, and to show how much work was done:

1) Be realistic, but always stress the positive.

2) Frame things in such a way that even if someone isn't there yet, that with continued effort they will be.

I really liked that last point.  As he said, someone can come across a recommendation years down the line, and if you say things like that, they'll read it and realize how far they've come, or realize that they never overcame that, and have the maturity to see that you evaluated them fairly.