Internship Assessment from Company Supervisor's viewpoints: a five-year experience

Abstract

In this paper, the assessment of curricular internships performed by the chemical engineering students from the last year of first cycle graduation from Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) is analysed considering the company supervisor point of view. The objective of this study is to verify if the students are able to integrate the real working world and if they have the required skills to develop the proposed activities during the internship. The analysis is based in the results of a questionnaire fulfilled by the company supervisor where different types of characteristics and competencies are evaluated in a scale from 1 (very poor) to 6 (excellent) allowing the assessment of the student's professional performance. A group of 102 students was considered distributed by five academic years (2009 to 2014) and 39 companies were involved.The results show that the assessment of the students' performance is globally very positive. The items showing better results refer to punctuality, attendance, learning skills during the internship and students' relationship with peers. The performance is not so good when considering sense of initiative, autonomy or scientific knowledge in specific areas. Overall performance is classified with a mean value very next to Very Good (5) grade and companies show a great availability to accept more internship students from ISEP.Considering the final academic grades obtained, the internship performance is very well classified by the companies' supervisors (mean of 17.3/20) reflecting the very high commitment of the students in their internships.