At the beginning of the summer, a task force made up of representatives from the Dean of Students office, the office of Sustainability, the Reference & Instruction Librarians, the Dean of the College office, and the student body (appointed by CSA) discussed modifying the student print management policy to address concerns brought forward by students and by ITS. The specific questions we addressed were how we should be distributing the quota (three equal parts, once per term, or all together at the beginning of the year), should there be a discount for duplex printing (even though it is charged at cost and a discount artificially lowers the price to below cost), and what the policy for refund requests should be. As a result of those discussions, we’re making the following changes to student print management.
1. Rather than distributing the quota in three equal portions at the beginning of each academic term, we are distributing the entire year’s amount before Fall Term starts ($96.00, or 2400 B&W impressions). This should alleviate the pressure for students whose printing-heavy classes are scheduled during fall term, rather than later in the year.
2. We are discounting duplex printing by a 1/2 cent per side for students printing from their personal accounts to one of the public printers (located in Cassat, CMC 104, Goodhue, LDC 220, LDC 243, the Library, Mudd 169, Sayles, Weitz 028, Weitz 138, and Willis 119) . Simplex printing costs $0.04 per black and white impression (side), and $0.15 per color side. Duplex printing for students will cost $0.07 per black and white double-sided sheet and $0.29 per color double-sided sheet.
During Winter Term 2014 a group of four students in Lauren Feiler’s behavioral economics class experimented with the effect of adding a script to the library printers asking people printing simplex if they wanted to switch to duplex. Although certainly not every person chose to switch, a significant percentage did. Based on this, we will also install this script for all the public lab printers for the 2014-2015 academic year.
3. We are going to turn on PaperCut’s interface for refund requests. Refunds will be issued only in cases of a printer error (such as a malfunction, smeared or unreadable text, or partially printed jobs), not for user error. Please note that if you paid for the job using Schillers, your refund will be issued as an increase to your available quota. If we suspect that refunds are being abused, we reserve the right to investigate individual cases more deeply and to refuse to grant refunds where we feel it is not warranted.