At Kristianstad University in Sweden it has been decided that all study programmes should have work-placed training consisting of at least a period of five weeks. In different strategy documents the University states that the main reason for this is to raise employability. At the same time the importance of maintaining academic quality is stressed. Interviews were carried out in 2006 with 22 students from The Health Promotion and Education Programme concerning what they perceived as the value and relevance of the concepts that are essential to academic quality, scientific foundation/scholarly activity, critical thinking and reflection, with respect to their practical activities during their internship. The results of the study show that the students perceived the value and relevance of the concepts quite differently. The five different patterns or categories that emerged: undeveloped, separated, performance-oriented, oppositional and participatory all give different prerequisites for developing professional expertise. The study reveals the importance of the students perceiving academic thinking to be important to their practical activities during their internship, but also the significance of a greater interaction between theory and practice for maintaining a better standard of education within higher education and for developing the prerequisites for professional expertise.