The candidate selection process of a PostGraduate Program involves several steps. One of these steps refers to the candidate selection made by a candidate's potential supervisor. An exploratory study was conducted having the Strictu Sensu PostGraduate Program of the Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares (IPEN) as an analysis unit in order to better understand the objective and subjective criteria used by supervisors before accepting a candidate as their student and possible consequences of their decisions. The central objective of the study was to identify if there is any association of these criteria and the scientific production of these supervisors and/or the dropout rate of these candidates after their approval. For the purpose of this study we assumed that a criteria is considered objective when analyzing a particular item selection is based on considering only verifiable evidence (documents, indicators) and a criteria is considered subjective when it is based on personal interpretations of verifiable information or not. A study was carried out in order to identify what those criteria are considering master's and doctoral candidates selection and analyzed if there is any association of these criteria with the scientific production of these supervisors and the dropout rate of these candidates after being selected. This study was organized into the following steps: (1) Development of conceptual research model representing the independent variables (objective and subjective criteria), the dependent variables (scientific production and evasion) and control variables (demographics advisers data, program area and other qualitative issues). (2) Preparation of a semi-structured interviews protocol. (3) Identification and selection supervisors among those having the greater and lesser scientific production. (4) Application of the interview protocol to the seven of the previously selected supervisors. (5) Qualitative analysis of interviews to identify the selection criteria. (6) Classification of these criteria into objective and subjective ones. (7) Construction a questionnaire with closed and open questions based on the criteria identified during an interview step. (8) Pre-test of this web-questionnaire with eight supervisors. (9) Forwarding the questionnaire to the 136 Post-Graduation Program active supervisors. The data was collected between March and May 2015. 92 supervisors answered the web-questionnaire. For the purpose of this paper we analyzed 33 closed questions (research variables). These closed questions were organized into eight factors where some of them pre-defined as objectives (Training and Reference); others as subjective (Availability) and others partially objective and partially subjective (Affinity, Performance, Experience, Ability and Motivation). The main conclusions of the research were: (1) exists, however small, an association between the selection criteria of candidates of IPEN's PostGraduate and academic production of their supervisors; (2) it was found that there is a difference ranging from small to moderate difference in criteria for selecting between supervisors with greater or lesser 20 years of Postgraduate experience (3) it was found there is a moderate difference in of the supervisors selection criteria depending on which area they are linked and (4) We did not observe the existence of an association between evasion advisees and the candidates selection criteria.
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