Thousands of 16-year-olds will be waiting anxiously today to know the results of their GCSE examinations.

Even though it is more than 40 years ago, I remember what it was like awaiting my own exam results.

But if past trends continue, the news will be seen as good by most of these youngsters. More and more pupils during the last decade or two have been passing them and getting better grades.

The A-level results earlier this month also showed an upward trend and more students at universities are also getting better degrees.

I am not one of those old fogeys who says education is not as good as it was. The way I was taught was in many ways stultifying and unimaginative. Much of the information I acquired was so esoteric that it was of no earthly use for any job, even this one.

But the rise in pass rates and grades defies all logic. Many more people are being persuaded to take these exams, which is generally a good thing, but it must mean the overall standard of entrant is lower.

How can the results go so markedly against that trend?

It is even more noticeable at universities. In the early Sixties when I could have gone to one, universities were for an academic elite of around 200,000 students. Now there are around 1.5 million and yet we are led to believe from the degree results that the overall standard is higher.

What's happening is everyone involved wants the results to improve and so they do in a benign, unofficial conspiracy. The pupils can wave around their pieces of papers with high passes on them and parents can share delight in their achievements.

The teachers can feel proud that these results have been achieved under their tuition and the heads can bask in the glories of good grades.

The examination boards share in that triumph. Local education authorities can say their schools are doing well while the Government can claim it is delivering on education.

But all this is no good for employers who have to choose young staff. Every employer knows these days you can take on people with nine GCSEs, three top-notch A-levels or a degree and find they lack the most basic skills.

Often they cannot write properly, add up and have little general knowledge.

Already GCSEs are less demanding than the old GCEs they largely replaced. It is becoming hard to fail A-levels and in future it may be that no one fails them at all. All this calls into question what examinations are for.

The old view was that they provided a consistent bench mark against which to test how pupils were faring year by year. Roughly the same proportion of pupils each year got high grades and passed exams. A considerable proportion failed.

Now we seem unwilling to accept that many, if any, pupils should fail. This is ridiculous, for in that cruel, commercial world lying outside the schools and colleges there are as many failures as successes. It would be far better to teach pupils that a GCSE, A-level or college failure is not the end of the world and that they can always try again. Equally, many of the most successful men and women have achieved their fame and fortune without any academic standards at all.

Most schools are doing a good job. But everyone in education should be honest about exams and mark papers consistently year by year.

Otherwise the most important factor will not be the grades people got but when they took the papers and that is ridiculous.