Students getting their GCSE results today are celebrating another record year of achievement with nearly 70 per cent of exam entries being awarded grade C or above.

This year marks 23 years of consecutive increase in the overall pass rate of exam entries at 98.7 per cent.

The amount of A and A* grades awarded for exams sat in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has gone up 1 per cent since 2009 at 22.6 per cent.

Almost three times as many pupils now gain the top grades compared with 1988 when GCSEs were first introduced.

With 2010 seeing the highest ever pass rate, further fuel could be added to the argument that GCSEs are getting easier.

Professor Alan Smithers, an education expert at Buckingham University, told the BBC that exam questions had become very predictable and that there was competition between exam boards to improve the pass rates.

But chief executive of exams regulator Ofqual, Isabel Nisbet, told the BBC that GCSEs are “a well respected qualification recognised by employers and educational institutions”.

“Candidates, employers, schools and colleges can have confidence that these results are a fair record of the students’ achievements and abilities,” she added.

The uptake of sciences exams among students has shot up this year with a 23.3 per cent increase in entries for GCSE Biology and both Chemistry and Physics entries are up by nearly a third to 121,988 and 120,455 respectively.

The same encouraging figures cannot be said for students taking languages, which has continued to decline since the previous government decided the subject would no longer be compulsory at the age of 14.

Entries in French and German are down by 5.9% and 4.5% respectively but there have been big rises in the number of pupils taking Portuguese, Chinese and Polish.

For the second year in a row, boys out performed girls in maths, with 58.6 per cent of boys' entries scoring at least a C compared with 58.3 per cent of girls'.

Overall though, girls are still outperforming boys. More than seven in ten (72.6 per cent) of girls' GCSE entries gained at least a C compared with 65.4 per cent of boys.