Evaluation of sensory acuity of students of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Warsaw University of Life Sciences - SGGW in the years 1975-2015

Veterinary students taking part in practical classes on "Hygiene of food of animal origin" course were tested on taste and odor identification as well as color differentiation. The results were subjected to statistical analysis to: (a) evaluate the influence of sex, smoking, time of day and status of health declared by the students on the results of tests; (b) determine the number of individuals who may fail the tests on taste and odor identification as well as color differentiation; (c) evaluate whether the sensory acuity of veterinary students changed in the 40 years of observation. The study involved 3310 students. A test for taste and odor identification was performed according to Polish Standard (PN-65/A-04021). The test for color differentiation was carried out using Rabkin color plates. The results of the study were elaborated using IBM SPSS Statistics 23. The chi-square test was used to determine whether there are significant differences between numbers of individuals assessed positively in particular experimental groups. The significance of the effect of experimental factors on the number of correctly identified samples was determined using analysis of variance. It was found that sex and smoking exerted a statistically significant effect (p < 0.01) on the number of subjects assessed positively and the number of correctly identified samples in three conducted tests. Female students more often than male students were assessed positively and correctly identified larger number of samples in all conducted tests. Nonsmokers obtained better results than smokers in all performed comparisons (significant difference at p < 0.01). It is worth noting that only 65.9% of students passed all three tests, and 1.3% of them did not pass any. In this last group were only men. The analysis of variance indicated that as time passed (since 1975 to 2015) sensory acuity of veterinary medicine students has increased.