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Summary:
Since 1999 I have been teaching a course in Color Management and Quality Assessment as part of the baccalaureate curriculum in Graphic Communication at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. In the years that I have taught the course, I have had nearly 900 students, and I have required every one of them to take the Farnsworth-Munsell color discrimination test as well as the Ishihara color-blindness test. In the early years, I scored the tests by hand, using a scoring sheet provided by the manufacturer. Though that was successful, I was never able to correlate the data from a number of tests. In 2007 and 2008 I entered the students' scores into the electronic scoring version of the Farnsworth-Munsell color discrimination test, and was able for the first time to make sound observations about the scores of the student group. At the end of the Fall quarter, 2008, I went back to the paper records of my former students and began entering the data from those courses. This paper includes students from Winter, 2005 to Fall of 2008, a total of 218 students. 156 of those students are or were enrolled in Graphic Communication, while the balance are my control group. The control group consists of students who are specifically not enrolled in the Graphic Communication program. The control group students are in many majors including Animal Science, Industrial Technology and Engineering. Though I did not encounter any, I had planned to eliminate from the control group any students in Art, Graphic Design or Architecture. The results of my analysis of scores on the Farnsworth-Munsell test were intriguing to me, even in the early years when I scored the tests manually. Graphic Communication students exceed the norm. According to the Farnsworth-Munsell test instructions and accompanying documentation, 16 percent of the general population score with Superior color discrimination. More than half of my students score in this range. And, right there is the basis for this research. Why do students in our graphic arts program perform better in color discrimination tests than average people?