The Gelman Library and computer lab managers have come up with a reasonable compromise that should accomplish their goal of cutting down on excessive printing without punishing students who use labs legitimately.

Printing in any one of the school’s computer labs has always been a frustrating experience. It seems like there is always that special someone who has decided to print out the entire encyclopedia Britannica, while others wait eons for their small-sized documents to print. Starting this semester, the school will implement a new system capping the amount of printed sheets at 1,250 per student. This is an improvement over the drastic 250-page limit with a fee of 10 cents for each extra sheet that had been discussed when the issue came up in spring 2000.

After much testing, GW’s Center for Academic Technologies developed this quota system hoping to minimizing wasteful printouts. The new cap system charges students nothing, it just disallows printing beyond the cap. It is unrealistic to think a student would need to print 80 pages a week for classes, but the University should remain flexible for the few who might.

According to CATs, 6 percent (or 960 people) of the 16,000 students and staff members who have Novell accounts print more than 1,200 pages. Those printing 500 pages or less in a semester represent 83 percent of the student population. The majority of the 960 users who consume more than twice the normal amount of paper are simply wasting paper.

Because the quota is reasonable, there appears to be little cause for concern about students borrowing each other’s Novell accounts to print above the allotted amount. CATs should give students the ability to monitor their total number of printouts at all labs.

While students will need to keep track of their paper usage, they should benefit from shorter waits at the printer. And saved money on paper and toner should allow lab managers to improve other parts of labs.

In light of quotas, professors ought to be mindful of students’ needs by having documents needed for the entire class printed on their accounts, using the school’s vast resources. For example, PowerPoint lecture notes could be distributed by teachers rather than leaving it up to students to print the required documents on their accounts.

Printing bandits beware, the days of wasting someone else’s time are fast approaching an end.