Pity the poor student who, in receipt of three A grades at A-level, is then told that the standard required for such an achievement is lower than ever before. Candidates can do no more than sit the exams for which they are entered, and criticism of the debasement of A-levels should never be confused with criticism of the students who take them.

But pity still more the student who, in receipt of two Es, then disappears for three years to university. In all likelihood, the student will be ill-suited to the demands of a university course, as the ever increasing number of drop-outs shows. As for those who do survive the course, they are often able to do so thanks only to the remedial classes which universities have had to set up to cope with the sub-standard skills possessed by first year undergraduates.

Most analyses of the problem with A-levels get this the wrong way round. It is not the decline in the standard required to achieve a given grade which has caused problems at universities. It is the change in university admissions which has caused problems with A-levels. Twenty years ago, their purpose was to sort out those who could derive benefit from university from those who could not. Thus the A-level failure rate of around 30 per cent was not a problem; it was the very point of A-levels.

Today, however, the government has determined that over half of school leavers should go to university. When almost everyone who wants to is allowed to, there is simply no point in having an exam which fails people. And so the A-level has changed fundamentally in purpose. It is no longer selective but now, rather, intended to give creddentials to as many candidates as possible. Thus it is today almost impossible to fail A-levels.

The real ‘dumbing down’ is not with A-levels but, rather, in universities – and all the more worrying for that. The very idea of higher education is now in trouble, with universities metamorphosing into an expected third tier of schooling, after primary and secondary education. Instead of educating a minority of academic achievers, they are being shaped into a post-school version of the comprehensive, available to everyone.

Universities are thus becoming another example of the prevalent culture of self-expression and personal fulfilment. Those students who have nothing worthwhile to gain from university are being told that, to be complete, they need a degree. This devalues both them and the universities. There is nothing lesser or incomplete about leaving education after school. University should, by definition, only be appropriate for a minority. But that definition is now changing and, with it, the proper notion of a university education.

That is just one reason why the reveived wisdom that A-levels should be scrapped in favour of a continental style Baccalaureate simply misses the point. Just because an idea comes from continent does not, of itself, make it worth adopting. In the same way as barely a word can be found against the adoption of the Baccalaureate today, so it was with the Exchange Rate Mechanism in the late 1980s. And we all remember how successful that was. The problem is not with A-levels. It is with the purpose to which they are put.

University admission policy demonstrates the most important rule in public policy: the law of unintended consequences. Exams now only serve a useful function if they can be passed by almost anyone. Spreading university education wider has not, as was intended by well meaning but naïve politicians and educationalists, broadened access to high quality education but turns out to have necessitated a lowering of standards universally.

Faced with this national disaster, there are two options. One is simply to accept it – to bow to political lie that nothing is wrong and that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The other is to realise the damage which this Weimar grade inflation is doing and to take control of the currency. There are two steps which are urgently required.

The first can be taken immediately. The current mess is the result in large measure of interference in a perfectly satisfactory system by politicians who have imposed their egalitarian agenda. Exams should be left to teachers, universities and employers (who, it must be remembered, need guidance as to the calibre of those who do not go to university). Exams should be taken out of the hands of politicians and placed in the hands of an educational equivalent of an independent central bank. Such a proposal could be adopted swiftly.

The second is more fundamental. We need to realise that universities are not appropriate for the majority of school leavers and that the drive to change their character is at the heart of all these problems. Until this most pernicious idea is defeated then we are fated to repeat the annual summer A-level angst.