So, I am as guilty as the rest of the nation of tutting that A levels must be getting easier as I watch yet more bright students rip open their envelopes on breakfast TV with glee, exposing four A grade passes. When in fact, on closer inspection, there is much more to the argument than just easier exams.

The first real truth of the situation has got to be that it is the journalists who are “dumbing down” largely given that August is not usually a hot news month. In fact, due to the fact that Prime Ministers are sunning themselves on foreign beaches, it is what is known in the trade as the “silly season”. Let’s face it, newspaper stories about exam results are only ever going to read two ways: bad results: equals bad schools, bad teachers and bad government. Good exam results: equals bad exams. Good exam results meaning students worked hard and teachers worked hard: well it’s just not much of a story.

For the teaching profession, students and parents who have – all in their own ways – worked flat out, the stories of “easy” exams can seem like a slap in the face, an undermining of their well-earned good grades. And one can only imagine that it adds insult to injury for those students unfortunate enough to do badly.

So, although results appear to get better year by year there is more to the story than that. This is the 25th year in a row that A level results have improved. The overall pass rate in England this year was 89.6% with 18.6% being awarded a grade A. If you go back to 1981 the A level pass rate in England was 68.1%.

However, in 1987 the way the exams are marked was changed. Before this date, examining bodies set percentages for each grade band, so called “norm referencing”. So in one year, if there were a particularly high number of good papers, some might end up as a grade B rather than a grade A. Conversely, in a poor year, students of a similar calibre might benefit from being pushed into a higher grade band due to low numbers of top grades.

On the one hand, this system is patently unfair as grades are influenced by the level of the entire body of students taking the examination rather than just the skills of the individual student. In effect, 30 per cent of students each year were expected to fail and the pass rate was pretty constant at around 70%. On the other hand, this old system had the benefit of grading an entire academic year across the country, giving universities and employers an idea of where a student stood as compared to his or her entire peer set.

The start of the trend in rising pass rates followed the change in this “norm referencing”. Papers are now marked according to “criterion referencing” – whereby grades are awarded according to pre-set criteria. If the student gets it right, he or she gets the grade, no matter how many other students get it right too.

Although this seems fairer to the student, it doesn’t make life easier for those who are trying to use the grades to differentiate between them. Take universities or employers for example. If everybody is getting the same good grades, then the examinations are not really doing the job they were designed for.

So, we end up having to move the goal posts. Students starting A Level courses in September are facing tougher courses, tougher exams and a higher grade to achieve: the A*, which will be awarded from 2010.

Dr Mike Cresswell, director general of the largest exam board, AQA, says the A* grade is an “eminently sensible” response to a problem of success. “You can see why a small number of universities have a problem differentiating between the very, very, very best and the very best,” he told the Guardian newspaper.

In response to a question about whether there would ever be A**s, Dr Cresswell added, “Were one to find oneself in a situation at some point where things had improved to such an extent that there was now a similar difficulty with the A*, the sensible thing to do would be to repeat the medicine.” But the A* would serve its purpose “for many years to come.”

So the government’s official response to the accusation that exams are getting easier is to make them harder. But this does not address other underlying concerns about the exams that the upbeat statistics often mask. For example, the fact that the spread of A grades at A level is becoming increasingly uneven between comprehensive schools and private and state selectives.

Dr. Cresswell believes that the very fact that comprehensives are dropping behind proves that the examinations are not getting any easier. “In terms of the proportion of people who get grade A, the gap between selective schools and independent schools on the one hand and other school types on the other hand has widened,” he said. “Over the past five years the proportion of A grades awarded to pupils from independent schools has risen by 6.5%. The rate in comprehensive schools is 3%. There would not be differences like this if the exams were getting easier,” he added.

Then one should take into consideration that the statistics on students achieving high grades at A level are only available for those who sit the exams in the first place. It is easy to argue that A-levels must be too easy since almost 97% of young people pass them. But what is not mentioned is that only about half of the student body even start their A levels. So a more accurate picture is that 28 per cent of teenagers pass three A levels and under four per cent of those achieve three A grades.

Finally, research undertaken into the A level examinations has consistently failed to support the notion that the exams are getting easier. This was the conclusion of the 1996 enquiry into exam standards called Standards over Time, which concluded that exams had not got any easier over the preceding 20 years.

We still have to wait for the conclusions of the international panel to check on exam standards set up by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) late last year.

It is chaired by Eva Baker of the US National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA and it should reveal its results on this year’s exams over the next couple of months.

Whatever the findings, it seems certain that it won’t stop the debate on “dumbing down”. That is as much a British tradition as the A level exam itself. The real shame is that the discussion doesn’t focus on the many students that don’t undertake the exam in the first place. Or why comprehensive schools are lagging behind when it comes to achieving the top grades?

Instead we get soundbites from universities claiming that students are illprepared for their courses. Or quotes from employers saying that new recruits lack basic literacy skills. The stories in the press show a deeper lack of understanding than just the exam results themselves. At their root is a distrust of a younger generation – more usually described as ASBO fodder – rather than hard-working, high achieving individuals. And of course, by undermining the high achievements of these individuals, stories in the press about easier exams makes the rest of us feel much better about our poor A level results all those years ago…

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