It’s aimed at freshmen who are just starting school at UNC-Chapel Hill and want to get caught up. But what does “paper class scandal” actually mean? And how did this whole thing start? In 2010, we were talking about tweets and popping bottles in clubs, not fake papers and questionable academic departments.Īt College Town, a student freelancer created a quick-and-dirty guide to the paper class scandal. You’ve probably heard it referred to as the paper class scandal. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is beginning its seventh year of an athletics scandal revolving around sham classes for student-athletes. This is common for so many news outlets, and it’s one of the biggest turnoffs for college students - and other non-regular news readers - who are trying to develop news habits. But if you aren’t fully up to speed on, say, why Republican state legislators don’t like House Bill 2 and why they’re so angry with Charlotte’s local government over it, that great writing can be hard to digest. Break Down Without Dumbing DownĪt the News & Observer, we have some of the smartest writing in North Carolina on state politics, local schools, college sports and more. We also put together a list of FAQs, published on Election Day, to remind students of some of the voting rules - aka no selfies in the ballot box. So we created a guide on how to vote early on campus, or how to vote by mail, or how to vote on Election Day. The voting process is daunting if you’ve never done it before. For many college students, the 2016 presidential election marked their first time voting. We’ve used this news-you-can-use technique for other stories, too. Please explain the terrifying class registration process to me. When might we hear whether we got into the school? Other posts go deeper. We’ve mimicked my high school questioning on College Town. I wanted to know how to become one of those acceptance letters. “We only accept a quarter of applicants”? Gulp. Sure, the university websites gave me some idea of what to expect, but they mostly just terrified me. I trusted what my friends said because they’d already done it. How high did my SAT scores have to be? What should I focus my essay on? What kinds of activities did I need to get involved in to set myself apart? When I was in high school, I remember obsessively quizzing my older friends about what they did to get into college. Focus on Service and First-person Stories Because of that simple search, I’m able to include a perspective on our site that I - as a young white woman - do not have. I liked her writing, and I sent her an email. (Students often put their college and graduation date in hashtag form on their Twitter and Instagram bios.) Morgan caught my eye because she linked to her personal blog. I found Morgan by searching the #UNC18 hashtag on Twitter. Often, you can find those people and those communities on social media. The lesson here is not “make sure you post stuff that young black people want to read on Twitter.” Instead, it’s to find the people who are connected to all kinds of communities and ask them write for you. As Black Twitter scholar Meredith Clark says in her Poynter column on the topic: “Black Twitter daily discusses real-world problems that mainstream media is either oblivious to or outright ignoring.” She decided to write this story because she - and other members of her community - found it interesting and useful. Morgan Howard, this student writer, is plugged into her young black community through Twitter.
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