Inflation figures, according to some statisticians, were miscalculated in America for the best part of a decade, causing the federal government to give millions of pensioners over-generous rises.“There are lies, damned lies and statistics”, indeed, must be one of the most over-used quotations of all time.

So why do we expect infallibility from A-level scores? Think of it: more than 700,000 subject entries, all marked by human beings, with all the marks then converted into grades. At the end of it, a grade B in a three-hour unseen maths exam set by OCR is supposed in some mysterious way to correspond to a grade B in art coursework marked by Edexcel. The wonder is not that the public is losing confidence in this nonsense, but that the public ever had any confidence at all.

Thus, we are told, as a result of the A-level “fixing scandal”, some students got grades AAB rather than grades AAA and therefore missed out on their preferred university places. Their stories are recounted as though this were a tragedy comparable to the slaughter of youth in the trenches of the First World War. I read of one student who had to go to Southampton rather than Sheffield. I entirely accept that Southampton is a dull city, and Sheffield more fun, but the poor girl will survive; she has not been sent to a concentration camp or down a coal mine.

To read the commentators on this strange affair, you would think that an A or B grade was some fixed, verifiable quantity, like the value of pi or the distance from the Earth to the moon. Yet the difference between the two may be just a few marks on one paper, and the marking is at least as fallible as the decisions on where to place the grade boundaries. There are injustices every year; no doubt there were more than usual this year after the introduction of a complex new system of examining. Significantly, it was the independent schools who led the song-and-dance. The difference between an A and a B can influence Oxbridge entry. Parents pay thousands because they expect the schools to deliver Oxbridge places.

The rest of us should be less shocked by a statistical “fix”: there is always some element of statistical fixing. Mike Tomlinson’s interim report implicitly accepts that there had to be more statistical fixing this year, because the boards had no previous A2 scripts to guide them. Passing roughly the same proportions as in previous years seems to me a sensible way to have proceeded. It is a pity that this approach was not applied consistently across boards and papers; but I am not persuaded that much consistency existed in previous years.

The truth is that the A-level system can no longer bear the weight that is placed upon it. If English universities decided entry largely on the basis of interviews and teachers’ reports everyone would understand that the judgments were subjective. If they used scores from a simple, multiple-choice test, as most American universities do, they could plausibly claim objectivity. What we have is a largely subjective system masquerading as an objective one. It is time we scrapped it, and tried something simpler and more honest.

Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman