IF you’re a young person who’s managed to do well in your GCSEs, you might be feeling a bit bewildered at the moment.

There you were, celebrating your success, but if you happened to watch the news on telly or read certain national newspapers, there were assorted older folk claiming the results of the new, harder exams were rigged to make you feel better.

Quite apart from being utter nonsense, this will have left you wondering how anybody could be nasty enough to say such a thing.

After all, you didn’t do anything wrong. All you did was work very hard in school for years while probably having to listen as some of your elders went on and on about how much harder the exams were in their day.

“Ah, the good old days,” they said, “when history stopped at about 1960 because the rest of it hadn’t happened yet, chemistry was all about transmuting base metal into gold and a typical maths question involved calculating how much old money somebody needed to buy a week’s supply of birdseed for their pterodactyl.

“Young people today don’t know anything. They can pass a GCSE by turning up and writing their name at the top of the paper - and even then they don’t have to spell it properly. They can abbreviate it like one of those newfangled text messages.”

Or something like that.

Then, like a lot of other GCSE students in recent years, you had to deal with politicians quacking on about changing the exams because too many people were getting top marks.

You also had to deal with changes to the marking system in which letter grades were replaced by number grades, but only sometimes, and for all you knew the number grades might soon change to grades based on ancient esoteric symbols for assorted demons, or strange and eerie hoots and whistles audible only to dogs.

All of this will be a wee bit confusing to any potential employer or college admissions tutor whose desk your CV lands on.

As if this were not enough by way of ridiculousness, you had to deal with the disruption of having your schools inspected by teams of people guided not so much by logic and rationality as by whichever random criteria had been decided on by politicians, senior civil servants and various other fools who probably hadn’t seen the inside of a school in decades.

“Ah yes,” the inspectors might have said in their reports, “we note that the young people are literate, numerate, articulate and decent, but the school is clearly a load of old rubbish because students are not required to hop around on one leg on Tuesdays while counting backward from a thousand.

“This is a grave failure, because according to some research I just pulled from my back pocket - or somewhere close to my back pocket - hopping around on one leg on Tuesdays and counting backward from a thousand is vital for intellectual development.”

As I said, you might be wondering why you’re getting such a hard time.

The answer is that politicians will do anything to secure votes - and too many older people are jealous of younger people.

They like to pretend they’re better and more knowledgeable, even though it’s you they come to when they can’t work their phone, their laptop or some other device with buttons.

Try to be understanding, and I hope you achieve everything you want to achieve.

Oh, and when you become an older person, try not to say things like: “Young people today don’t know they’re born - there were none of these biometric neck implants and back-up consciousness downloads in my day...”