The Prime Minister mocked GCSE exams for being too easy, suggesting one question asked how students viewed the moon – “through a telescope or a microscope”.
Mr Cameron was challenged at Prime Minister's Questions over Mr Gove’s controversial plans to replace the widely mocked GCSEs with the old fashioned O-levels and CSEs in 2014.
He said the changes would create a new gold standard which would stretch the brightest pupils.
Asked if the Prime Minister wanted to bring “back O-levels and CSE-style exams”, he said the UK had to have “in our country an absolute gold standard of exams that are about rigour and high standards”.
Mr Cameron said: “The tragedy is that we inherited from the previous Government a system that was being progressively dumbed down, where Britain was falling down the league tables and GCSE questions included things such as, ‘How do you see the moon—is it through a telescope or a microscope?’
“Government Members think we need a rigorous system, and that is what we are going to put in place.”
Details were leaked last week of proposals for pupils to take O-levels in traditional subjects such as English, maths, science and the humanities by 2016 while less able pupils would take old-style CSE qualifications.
Yesterday, Mr Gove suggested the Government did not want to introduce a two-tier system. He said GCSEs already separated out the weakest pupils, with many forced to sit a foundation paper in which they could achieve a grade C at best.
Mr Gove said: “I want us to ensure that in the next 10 years at least 80 per cent of our young people are on course to securing good passes in properly testing exams in maths, English and science - more rigorous than those our children sit now.
“This goal, while explicitly ambitious, is also entirely achievable. In Singapore the exams designed for 16-year-olds embody all those virtues and are taken successfully by 80 per cent - and rising - of the population.”
Mr Gove he would like to see a society in which every child, unless there are specific reasons, has the chance to make their own choices on exams.
This was as a possible shift from last week’s proposals, which suggested that less able pupils will sit simpler examinations similar to the old CSEs.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he knew nothing about the plans, while Lib Dem sources said they would be “very, very hostile” to a two-tier system.
