It's official - gap years make you smarter!

Recent research has shown that people who take a year out before university, on average score a first year university grade 2.3% higher than those who come straight from school. That may not sound like much, but if it's the difference between a 2.1 and a 1st (or a pass and a fail), I'm sure we would all care!

Now whether this is because we actually become cleverer as a result of our gap year, or if it's just because we've got some of the post school madness out of our systems before we've actually started our degree, it can only be a good thing.

In any case, if you have an university interview coming up and they ask you to justify your decision to defer entry, you now have a statistic to back it up!

See the full article on this study here