Leaving school for a period of time can have significant effects on students’ academic success. In this article, we analyze how taking an academic break for a different number of semesters affects students’ academic performance in terms of their Grade Point Average. This study is conducted at a university in Korea by analysing academic records of 653 undergraduate students who entered the university from 1998 to 2013. In addition, 101 currently enrolled students were surveyed to collect students’ opinions on the effects of academic breaks. We investigate changes in grades before and after a school leave and compare the final grades of students who had academic breaks to students who continued their studies without having any breaks during their undergraduate education.Our results indicate that students’ grades improve after coming back to the university from a four or more consecutive semesters break, however their final GPAs did not statistically differ from their peers who studied continuously, this suggests that students should not be afraid of taking longer academic breaks.

离开学校一段时间会严重影响学生的学业成绩。在本文中，我们将从平均学分的角度分析不同学期的学业中断对学生的学习成绩产生的影响。这项研究是通过分析1998年至2013年进入该大学的653名本科生的学术记录在韩国的大学中进行的。此外，还对101名目前在校的学生进行了调查，以收集学生对学业中断影响的意见。我们调查放学前后的成绩变化情况，并将学业中断的学生的最终成绩与继续学习但在大学教育期间不中断的学生的最终成绩进行比较。