ECONOMIST'S ARTICLE

Surfing on the website of the "Economist", an important English language  weekly news, an article stroke my attention: the article was written by Catherine Rampbell, a reporter for the New York Times, and it presented the title "A’s Have Been Harvard’s Most Common Grade for 20 Years". The reporter wrote this title on purpose, to increase reader's curiosity and to support him to go on with the reading of the article, indeed she doesn't specify the reason why A's have been Harvard's most common grade for 20 years: it may be due to a softer grading standard than the past years, or to an increased level of learning of the students.

Considering the structure of the article, the first thing that the reader notices is the frequent use of statistical data, highlighted by a picture that express the grade distribution over the time. The article bears the opinions of different experts , who underline their opinions with the statistical use of numbers.

The article focuses on the increasing of the common grade , the "grade inflation", of American colleges and Universities. The "grade inflation" is perfectly noticeable in the diagram done by Stuart Rojstaczer, who tracks and aggregates grading data at colleges, including some data going back to prewar times. The result of the diagram of Rojstaczer was the increasing of the GPA ( Grade Point Average) in American colleges and Universities, both privates and publics, in the last 20 years: from a GPA of 2.93, typical of the 90's years, to a GPA of 3.11 ,typical of the current years.

Moreover, the final point treated by Rojstaczer was the disparity of the GPA between private schools and public schools. He explained that for the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem.But starting in the 1950s,  grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools. In other words, according to Rojstaczer, both schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more. 

The answer to the first question of the reader, which deal with the fact whether the grade inflation comes from a softer grading standard or from a students' more accurate ability of learning , is that the increasing of the Grade Point Average is due to a softer grading standard: according to Rojstaczer American schools nowadays are less rigorous.

Considering the language, is obvious that the language used by the reporter is functional to his goal: she wants to recall the "grade inflation" of the current years using objective elements, like statistical data given by Stuart Rojstaczer.