In my opinion, the most important thing in application differs much from people to people, from school to school. But generally speaking, they will consider all the materials they have and at last, if there ARE STH VERY OUTSTANDING CONCERNING you, they will surely give you what you want.
Among the most important things, including recommendaiotns, transcripts, score in GRE and Tofel, the most common standard is that TRANscript, TOFEL, GRE SUB, GRE GENERAL, then the recommendation.
The recommendation becomes the most trivial thing in this procession is because:
(1) USA professors seems already know that few letters were written by faculty members, they are always the work of students''.
(2) There are few professors in china which are famous and willing to write recommedations for students who is going out.
(3) Most professors are not so famous as to be useful in deciding the students'' being admitted or not.
But we have some exceptions here. When you are lucky enough to find a famous professor, famous to be known by many professors in USA, Acedamy members are not enough in this issue though. To provide a instance, like Zhang Dainian, Chen daisun, or Zhou Guangzhao, or some people who are very close friend or holding close relations with the professors you are applying, these peoples recommendations will be extremely useful.
Anyway, the recommendations are required in the applications, so we need to choose the recommendations and the people to write it. There are 6 kinds of recommendations, each is worse then the next one.
(1) Letters written by you, signed by famous professor or professor closely related to the school you are applying;
(2)Letters written by you, corrected by those people as refered above;
(3)Letters written by you, signed by common faculty professors;
(4)letters written by you, corrected by those people as above;
(5)Letters written by famous people and you have no access to it;
(6)Letters written by common ones.
Choose you letters in the order above, and there are many sad experiences concerning the case against this basic rule: I was refused by 4 top schools just because I have used a very famous academy memeber''s four reference letters. There are many other skills concerning the resume, etc. which I will cover next time. I guess as a conclusion, to make your reference letter useful, you must,
(1) Make totally good words in it, or make it more realistic, put sth. bad but not improtant at all;
(2)Choose relevant people to write it, either they do not know, or they know very well, Academy member in other fields will equals to common ones, or even worse because you can not get good words from them generally speaking.
