Honours students will no longer have free printing in postgrad computer labs, due to a charging system error which has now been fixed by the University.
An Honours student told Salient that Honours students were able to print for free in the labs until last week. The student says it’s “really unfair of SCS to change the costs for printing half-way through the year.”
“Moreover, it’s symbolic of the feeling that many Honours students have of being treated as postgrad by their lecturers but as undergraduates by the University. We face the stresses of being postgraduate students, but have no access to any of the resources that Masters and PhD students have (including offices with free printing). And now our free printing has been taken away.”
Peter Borich, Service and Operations Group Manager for Information Technology Services, says the issue “relates specifically to two ITS student printers, one in VZ101 the other in Murphy 215 and is not an Honours student printing issue as such.”
Borich says the printers have never actually been free – “an anomaly in the charging system meant that ITS was paying for the printing, instead of those charges being passed on, as is the agreed process for student printing within VUW.”
Borich says the University is in the process of replacing all student printers, and have used the opportunity to fix the anomaly. Colour printing has been reduced from $1.00 to 50cents per page following the printer replacement.