EACH year it is the same. The results come out and the commentators, the worriers, the politicians and the misery-guts stick their oars into the debate, usually striking a few unguarded youngsters about the head as they do so.

Last Thursday it was the A-levels, today it is the GCSEs; and while the young students nervously await their results, people who haven't sat an exam in decades indulge in their annual moan.

The exams are too easy, the do-downers say. Wasn't like that it my day. A-levels were A-levels back then. Now anyone can get a grade A - they're handing them out like sweets.

How you look at this issue probably depends on a number of factors, including, perhaps, when you last took an exam and whether or not you have children of an age to be waiting for their results.

Something which has undeniably changed is that exams are no longer the unforgiving master of the education system. While students studying for A-levels and GCSEs still sit exams, much of the work has been done by that point. Thanks to constant assessment,and course work which goes towards the A-level, today's students are more aware of how well they are doing all the way along.

In my day - do you know, that is the first time that pensionable expression has found its way into this column - it was all down to exams. I even studied for an English degree in which exams at the end of three years were everything. All the course work, all those pseudo intellectual essays - not one of them counted for a BA bean. It was the exams or nothing.

For years later I suffered the exam nightmare, the one where it's the day of the exam and I hadn't done any work at all, not a stroke. That dream has long since been replaced by a newspaper version. The clock whizzes round, the Doberman deadline snaps at my heels. And again nothing has been done, not a word written or edited.

My teenage son will get his GCSE results today and I'm fraught with borrowed nerves. In two years, we'll have it all over again with the A-levels.

It would take a bigger brain than mine to say for sure that A-levels are easier than they used to be. What they are is different. Perhaps today's students are spoon-fed, steered through a system biased against failure; or maybe they display great maturity, tackling subjects their parents would never have managed at that age.

I'll leave that for others to decide. What interests me is this: it is not the young people's fault the exam system is as it is. These exams are constructed by adults. It's the young people who have to do all the hard work, who have to jump all the endless assessment hurdles. If, at the end of it all, they don't get mostly As, they will feel they have failed.

There are times when young people can't win. All too often the popular images of youth are negatives: trouble-makers, louts, drug-takers and so forth. Then when they do well, when they really achieve something, we tell them that the exam they passed was a worthless doddle.

We shouldn't belittle our A-level students. Instead, we should praise their achievements and welcome their eagerness to do well. We need bright, successful men and the women in the future, and that's where today's GCSE and A-level students are starting out.

One expert suggests that firms and universities should forget about A-levels and instead rely on psychometric tests to grade young people. And what does this man do for a living? Yes, he flogs psychometric tests.

Anyone who has been on a work course is likely to have sat one of these bizarre personality quizzes. Tick a few boxes, answer a few questions, describe yourself as a this or a that.

Somehow it is assumed that by doing such psycho-babble quizzes, your personality and intelligence can be measured like so many cornflakes.

I'd have thought that A-levels were a far better test of aptitude.

Updated: 10:02 Thursday, August 26, 2004