Forty-seven years ago I cycled the dozen or so miles from my home in south Croydon to Wallington grammar school in a state of hyperventilating panic. It was O-levels rather than GCSEs in those days and, if you wanted immediate information, you had to go to the school to learn your fate. The nerve-racking tension in the run-up to the publication of results was the same. Anxious to avoid public humiliation, I set out early in case my grades were really bad. In the event, I scraped through the lot. I even managed a grade 6 in maths. The realisation that I’d never have to struggle with another quadratic equation remains one of the most ecstatic moments of my life.

Next week A-level hopefuls are going to experience the agony or the ecstasy. The week after it is the turn of this year’s GCSE candidates. Two things are certain. One, that results in both GCSE and A-level exams will continue to improve with even more candidates achieving top grades; two, that girls will continue, because exams now depend so much on coursework, to outperform boys.

In 1962 there were some pretty bright boys in my O-level class. Half a dozen went on to win awards at Oxford and Cambridge. Virtually everybody ended up at a top university. Few, if any, achieved 10 grade As at O-level. Today, anyone who goes to an academic school and doesn’t get that many A*s at GCSE might as well become an apprentice dustman or, worse, sign up for one of the government’s new diplomas. Tuck into your bacon and eggs and thank your lucky stars that you are not 16 and struggling in a world where academic standards have improved so radically.

This is not a wholly ironical observation. I talk to bright GCSE and A-level students and I am horrified by the treadmill of their classroom existence. They are taught the “right” answer as prescribed by the examiner and warned against any independent thought. One tedious coursework assignment is completed and another immediately looms. Above all, these students realise that it is a farce. They know that the intellectual challenge is pathetic, and, because everybody will win it, the prize (10 A*s at GCSE, three or four A grades at A-level), meaningless.

You either believe that every generation of students is brighter and more diligent than the last and that teachers today are more competent than the nincompoops who struggled to teach me in the early Sixties, or you don’t. I don’t. I know that I had some wonderful teachers, and I thank them for all that they did for me.

Ministers might fulminate against anyone who questions, to quote the threadbare defence that has been dragged out every summer in recent years, “the achievements of hard-working students and their deeply committed teachers”. However, the evidence speaks for itself: more students are now awarded top grades at GCSE and A-level because the exams they sit have become progressively easier.

Take the GCSE in my own subject, English. The headmaster of Harrow school, Barnaby Lenon, makes his sixth-formers take a literacy test that assesses their ability to use full stops and capital letters and spell words such as “committed” and “accommodation”. Those who make more than 20 mistakes are given extra tuition until they pass. Harrow is a top public school whose sixth-formers are likely to have an A* grade in GCSE English. If its headmaster has these concerns about the basic literacy of his students, and has gone to the extent of devising such a test, what does it say about GCSE English standards generally?

The truth, however vigorously ministers might pontificate to the contrary, is that it is perfectly possible to pass GCSE English with a good grade and be weak at spelling and punctuation. Today’s GCSE English exam bears no resemblance to the O-level I took in 1962. We had to write an essay of 450 words, answer comprehensive questions on a lengthy and quite complex passage, and reduce a second passage of 500 words to 150. The latter task, the infamous precis, went years ago. So, too, did clause analysis along with any explicit questions on grammar. The intellectual demand of the comprehension passages and the sophistication of the questions have been gradually reduced. I would say, having dusted down some old exercise books, that today’s English GCSE roughly equates to the work we were doing at 13 or 14.

At some point next year there will be a general election. If Labour wins, the rot will bite deeper. The latest ministerial wheeze is to “modularise” GCSEs. This means that each subject syllabus will be divided up into a number of units and that candidates will be tested on each unit as it is completed, as has already happened with A-levels. If students fail a module they will be allowed to retake it. Kathleen Tattersall, the chairwoman of Ofqual, the body created to regulate exam standards, has insisted that “GCSE standards will be maintained”.

She did not, however, explain how an exam where candidates are tested on small parts of the syllabus (and can retake each test if they do not like the mark they achieve) can be compared with a traditional end-of-course assessment in which they have just one chance to demonstrate their grip on the totality of the syllabus. You might not like the stress involved in the latter kind of exam, but you cannot pretend that the modular version is as demanding. Unless, that is, you are the chairman of the body responsible for defending educational standards.

This debacle is typical of what Labour has done to public exams. Michael Gove, the Conservative spokesman on education, has said that a future Conservative government would restore credibility to the exam system. He has not yet spelt out what this means. He should, and quickly. No issue in education is more important. What he says could decide how a good many people cast their vote.

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