173 Business Communication Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 2, June 2011 173-178 DOI: 10.1177/1080569911404064 © 2011 by the Association for Business Communication ACADEMIC INTEGRITY AND STUDENT PLAGIARISM: GUIDED INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESS COMMUNICATION ASSIGNMENTS Ephraim A. Okoro Howard University OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, much emphasis has been placed on academic integrity and student plagiarism at faculty meetings in the School of Business at Howard University. Consequently, business communication professors were invited to give a presentation at a recent faculty meeting to identify creative and strategic ways to enhance students’ writing effectiveness, because capstone and core courses at the school increasingly require writing assignments and presentations. Faculty members have consistently expressed strong concern for improved communication skills in the School of Business, and business communication professors have been assigned the task of ensuring that students learn to document sources carefully and appropriately. In addition, students’ written papers should achieve coherence and evi- dence well-developed content. At our department meeting last year, faculty members across subject areas also criticized students’ inability to write in an acceptable manner, specifically identifying plagiarism as a more disturbing issue, which, unfortunately, is a common phenomenon on many university and col- lege campuses these days. However, whether or not students intention- ally or unintentionally plagiarize in their assignments remains a matter that requires a strategic measure. Painfully enough, despite the avail- ability of established rules and penalties for failure to acknowledge sources, there are still complaints about inadequate documentation, inappropriate use of authority, inability to evaluate sources, and failure to distinguish between paraphrases and quotations.