A levels and GCSEs are no longer a reliable guide to academic achievement because grade inflation has made it easier for everybody to get top marks, the Conservatives have claimed.

The A level has long been held as the gold standard qualification of the British examination system, but Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, said that it had been steadily devalued over the years.

“Just as you need more and more currency to buy the same goods when you have monetary inflation, so you need more and more As to aspire to top rankings internationally, when you have grade inflation,” he said.

A Tory government would stop this slide by pegging A level and GCSE standards to a fixed international benchmark, he said.

In a wide-ranging speech to the Haberdashers’ Foundation in London, Mr Gove cited academic research suggesting from the University of Durham suggesting that a student achieving an E in A-level maths in 1998 would have achieved a B in 2004.

Science papers were now so easy that students did not need any prior scientific knowledge to answer some questions, he said, while English candidates were awarded points for “spelling and expressiveness” if they wrote obscenities on their answers.

Under a Tory government the exams regulator Ofqual would be required by ensure that exam standards and pass marks were held steady over the years and that they remained comparable with examination standards in other countries, he said.

He also hit out at schools which entered pupils for “soft” subjects, such as media studies, that were considered easy to pass, in order to meet government targets on GCSE pass marks. GCSE entries in media studies had increased by 43 per cent in just two years.

Mr Gove also cited the case of a new examination called Performing Engineering Operations, which requires just one day's study on day release to college and can be worth six good GCSE passes.

“This flight from quality is a concern for all of us - the scientific breakthroughs which will combat global warming, the mathematical models which will reduce financial risk and the medical innovations which will lengthen and enrich our lives are unlikely to be generated by close application to the GCSE media studies syllabus,” he said.

Mr Gove also attacked the prevailing “progressive” approach to education, which is rooted in a belief that children should be left free to discover at their own pace.

He called for a return to fact-based learning with children sitting in rows, instead of the current tendency for discussion groups.

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