Ross Woods, 2018, '20, '21
For the purposes of this article, internships and practicums are programs where students are placed with employers to learn on the job in order to earn a college qualification, but are not paid for their services. They might have to pay for college supervision and might be funded by government study loans. In many cases, their applies skills are also assessed on the job.
The core ethical guideline is that students’ activities must primarily be a learning and assessment experience. The biggest ethical problem in internships is that some employers treat interns as “free slaves.” They require interns to do extra work beyond the requirement of the internship. The extra work can take many forms:
Students are powerless in the relationship. The employer can say, “We’ll fail you If you don’t do the extra work.” “You’re single. It’s easy for you to do extra. We have families.” “You can see how committed we are. Why aren’t you as committed as us?”
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. It is to some extent a matter of perspective, and the employers' primary interest is in running a successful business. The intern must do enough valuable work to justify training and employers aren’t expected to take a loss for having interns. It is fair and realistic for an employer to ask interns to help in something outside their job descriptions in extraordinary circumstances, the same as any other employee with a job description. “Joseph is sick this afternoon and had to go home. Can you teach his class?” The question is then “How does one define 'extraordinary circumstances'?”
Staff can say, “We won’t teach; that’s the college’s job.” The college might say, “We won’t supervise on-job learning; that’s the employer’s job.” This occurs when guidelines have not been put in place beforehand and enforced later on.
Employers should not give interns tasks before they are trained to perform them. This is unfair on clientele because the risk is high that students’ services are below standard. Interns themselves contribute to the problem if they willingly accept those tasks because they have more confidence than ability. Supervisors might “throw people in at the deep end,” which results in a few spectacular successes and many drownings. Supervisors might also treat it as an initiation rite, where the gatekeepers deliberately inflict an unpleasant experience on an applicant as condition of acceptance. They justify the approach thinking, “It was good enough for me, so it’s good enough for them.”
Employers raise the question, ”When must interns operate at a professional level?” Some tasks can only be done under supervision, and interns should opportunities to get practice and experience before assessment. They can be asked to operate at a professional level at least during assessment, and, if they can’t, they fail the assessment.
Again, there are two gray areas. First, even when the intern has been prepared, part of any learning experience is the risk of taking on new tasks and perhaps failure. People are working at the limits of their abilities. In other words, people can't be so prepared that all risk is eliminated. Second, the employer can often say “They’re only learning so they’re not allow to do the actual task.”
The practicum host can easily ignore the terms of an agreement between the college, the practicum host, and the student. The student is powerless and the college is off-site.
While it is clearly unethical for supervisors to ask interns for payment for a favorable reference, the point is how can the employer and the college prevent it?
Some interns might expect employment at the end of their internship, based on an implicit promise from the employer, but there are no job openings when the internship ends. Hoever, the employer then gets other interns to work for free. (This is also a problem for internships that are volunteer programs for recent graduates to gain work experience.)
You're assessed when you're ready.
One internship supervisor had a practice of telling interns that “We’ll assess you when you’re ready.” The intent was that students wouldn’t be assessed until the assessor was sure that they had acquired all competencies and would definitely pass. The beneficial side-effect was that no student would ever fail.
However, it had several detrimental effects. First, students never knew when they would graduate, creating uncertainty for their futures and trapping them in a role as “free slaves.” They did not know when they might graduate, but knew they certainly would not graduate if they left. If they had to pay fees for each semester, they were forced to continue paying fees with no debt limit in sight. Second, it appeared dishonest as the program was advertised as taking a particular period of time, but the host institution felt no obligation to plan for students to finish in the advertised time.
The solution? The college should check that the plan is feasible for students to acquire all competencies and be assessed as passing in the advertised time.
This is the question, ”When should interns be allowed on site?” In almost all job roles, interns must have a particular set of skills before they are permitted to commence basic tasks. In some cases, they are required before even being permitted on the worksite. Those skills should be written down and used as selection criteria for internship placements.
Banda, Grace Mkandawire. 2017. “Students’ perceptions of the open and distance learning mode for initial primary teacher training in Malawi: A case of Lilongwe Teachers’ College” Journal of Research in Open, Distance and eLearning Volume 1, Issue 1.
Woods. R. Practicum best practice, 2018.