If you need to adjust it, adjust it. It's not a big deal. However, you can't have them be the stars of the journalism school as freshmen, or something like that. They can't be taking advanced classes. But you can have them in a basic reporting class, and no one will know the difference. At my school, after you take Introduction to Newswriting, you take Introduction to Reporting. This is another very basic class that is a prerequisite for everything. Basically each student is required to write one news article per week. They are all given a beat (cops, town council, education, health and medicine, social service, university administration, etc) and they have to write six stories that relate to their beat. On top of that, everyone is required to write one cops story, one court story, two meetings stories, and one story of their choosing. The class meets during the week and talks about random things. (I was never really clear what the point of the classes were, we didn't do anything. But I think the professor was supposed to be teaching us about how to cultivate sources, interviewing techniques, etc to improve our skills.) The final is a long, in depth story on any topic we chose.
Most students who have any sort of journalism background at all think this class is boring and unchallenging. Because I worked for the student newspaper, I always did the least I could possibly do to get by on the stories I wrote for my reporting class, and focused on doing a good job on the articles that were actually going to be published. My friends and I always said we paid our tuition to work at the student newspaper. That was where we did our real learning.
Annie
