Introduction. The health of medical students is a necessary condition for the formation of competent professionals in the field of prevention. One of the factors ensuring the preservation of students’ health is the physiologically sound management of the educational process at the university, which requires an assessment of the difficulty of the disciplines of the curriculum. The lack of elaboration of this issue leads to errors in planning the academic load, mental and emotional overstrain and acts as a risk factor for reducing the health of students.

Material and Methods. The study was conducted on the basis of the Faculty of Medicine and Prevention of the Ryazan State Medical University named after Academician I.P. Pavlov. The object of the study was 5-year students (fifty seven people). According to the results of a sociological study, the difficulty of communal hygiene, occupational hygiene, food hygiene, hygiene of children and adolescents, and the duration of extracurricular self-training were studied. The students’ performance was studied by the method of proof-reading studies using the Anfimov tables daily in the course of the academic week (Monday to Friday) at the beginning and end of the practical lesson.

Results. The study showed significantly less difficulty for students to study the hygiene in children and adolescents (4 points) compared with food, labour, and communal hygiene, the difficulty of which had similar values (6.3–6.5 points). The revealed differences in difficulty according to the results of self-assessment correlated well with the duration of extracurricular self-training and were confirmed by reliable direct correlations.  The increase in the average coefficient of working capacity in students in the course of the academic week in classes on hygiene of children and adolescents, as well as a significant increase in the proportion of students with a decrease in working capacity in classes on food hygiene and communal hygiene on Friday compared with Mondays confirm the revealed differences in difficulties according to subjective self-assessment.

Limitations. The objectives of the study did not include studying the factors influencing students’ subjective assessment of the difficulty of the subjects studied.

Conclusion. Consequently, the results of self-assessment of the difficulty of the studied disciplines, supplemented by data from the timing of extracurricular self-training, can be used to build scales of difficulty of specialized academic disciplines at the medical and Preventive Faculty of the medical University.

Compliance with ethical standards. The study was approved by the local Ethics Committee of the Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Ryazan State Medical University of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation. All participants gave informed voluntary written consent to participate in the study.

Contribution: Dementiev A.A. – research concept and design, material collection and data processing, statistical processing, text writing; Kiryushin V.A. – editing; Tsurgan A.M. – collection of material and data processing, statistical processing; Motalova T.V., Solovyov D.A., Korshunova E.P. – material collection and data processing. All authors are responsible for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript final version.

Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

funding. The study had no sponsorship.

Received: March 13, 2024 / Revised: December 7, 2024 / Accepted: March 26, 2025 / Published: June 27, 2025