ITS monitoring student printing, reviewing quota

 Services department can monitor what every student in a campus lab is printing.  
The reason for the monitoring is to see if the $25 quota every student has will give a sufficient amount of pages for academic purposes each semester.
“I can see the name of the job that is being printed, which I review periodically just to determine if there is a particular class, job or print required by an instructor that may be creating too large an impact on a student’s print quota,” Annette Littrell, manager of academic and client technologies, said. “If we see that the latter is the case, we can offer assistance to the professor to find alternatives for printing to help students.”
Littrell said they are not invading anyone’s privacy.
The main concern is that all students have a sufficient amount of printing for their academic needs.
This summer was the first time the Pharos System, which tracks the print jobs, was implemented.
Throughout the summer semester, only 33 students exceeded the $25 quota, and 16 of those students exceeded the quota by more than 50 pages.
Littrell said if the same few numbers of students are going over their quota, then they will know the quota is sufficient.
If a significant number of students exceed the quota, the ITS department will look back and make sure the reason they went over was because of academic reasons rather than personal reasons.
Since the system has been put into place, Tech has seen a reduction of 25 percent of waste so far.
Approximately 150,000 pieces of paper were printed on this summer. Had the Pharos System not been in use, nearly 38,000 additional pages would have been automatically printed and gone to waste.
“We will monitor the system over time because we always want to balance the issue between conservation of resources and serving the needs of the students,” Curtis Armstrong, interim associate vice president of ITS, said.  
If a student goes over the quota, the document will still print without interruption.
Once a month, any printing charges that have accumulated will be billed to the student’s account through the Bursar’s Office.