Reference letter

[Duneranger]

I strongly disagree with what you are implying.

Just like us CBE students, instructors too can (and do) adapt to the CBE way. Why would anyone suggest that they do not have the means or knowledge about how to form an opinion on us students based on our CBE experience?
What does "know you as a person" mean? Is a request for a letter of a recommendation a marriage proposal? Do they need to know my diet? Or, do they need to know if I like dogs or not? Or, perhaps they need to know whether I like chocolate or vanilla? What kind of questions will satisfy the (of course supposed) requirement of "knowing you as a person"? Do they actually need to "know me as a person"? And why if you were in their shoes would need to?
CBE or not, we are still students, and they - instructors. They have access to our work (milestones and final assessments); they know when we send our assignments; they can see who and when "goes to school" (I mean who and when is logging on the learning platform); they have our school email addresses in case there is a need for communication. A letter of recommendation is an evaluation/opinion about a student's qualities as a student, not as a person. Now, of course you may say "none of this is what I am implying", but just because you may say so does not necessairly mean it isn't.

Interesting response. 

I don't know your experience with applying to fellowships, post-doc roles or grad school, but letters purely based on a student writing good papers, doing quality powerpoints or scoring well on tests aren't always going to cut it. At least not in my line of work. These academic accolades are already expected of all the applicants (and reflected in one's GPA)  and partially why I feel some aspects of LORs are archaic (the check the box types). That doesn't mean they don't have some sort of role in academia though.

CBE education is pretty low prof/student interaction (Kinda the point right? Do the work as quick as possible then move on). We don't really know how much they think or reflect on our individual works (or how much they separate us as individual students besides name recognition on an assignment). It's impossible to quantify this. I have had to review applications with LORs and the boilerplate ones about a students assignments don't stand out as much as those that comment on academic ability as well as some personal investment into who the person is. These are critical attributes for the military, medicine, certain business leadership programs and other academic fields.

I don't really understand your last sentence and it seems sort of unnecessary.