Effective undergraduate instruction requires accurate knowledge of professional communication practices and employer expectations, but ongoing contradictions between academic and professional expectations reflect historical, rhetorical, and pedagogical causes for inaccurate presumptions. Taking a customer service perspective, one business faculty revised its undergraduate goals in terms of empirically determined employer expectations. Interviewing professionals familiar with expectations of entry-level business graduates, the authors identified 10 communication activities, each comprising three to nine subtasks that constitute entry-level communication competencies. The results suggest a need to reconsider traditional curricular organization and instructional focus across the business curriculum to develop relevant skills across all business majors.

Despite university policies and classroom procedures designed to deter student plagiarism, upper-division students seemed to be violating the rules in growing numbers. Recent research suggested that student plagiarism results from a complex mix of factors, including a need for instruction, but offers little guidance regarding effective teaching methodologies. The authors developed and tested an instructional protocol and concluded that a mastery learning approach provides an effective method for reducing student plagiarism.