If you're going to ask students...

This study has been hailed as showing that English students (as in students in England, not students of English - that would be more believable) are the laziest in Europe - studying for a mere 16.5 hours a week on average.

The director of the institute, Bahram Bekhradnia, said there was also a marked gender difference in the amount of studying that students did. "Boys are down the pub and the girls are in the library, you can characterise that as," he said.

More accurately, I suspect, boys say they're in the pub, and girls say they're in the library. If you go around asking students how hard they work, you're only ever going to get one response: 'Me? Oh I don't do a stroke of work, just sit in the pub all week and then write the essay the night before.' To listen to students is to believe that no-one cracks a book all term - so try going to the library and taking out books on the reading list - either one student's reading all of them, or students are showing off for the researchers.