This much I know. Matthew Arnold was a nineteenth-century English poet, and Matthew Arnold was full of it. I know this because I am here on a hill by a lake, pursuing the perfect, and I am in a sour mood.

Sure, show me twenty-seven up and twenty-seven down for a perfect game at the old ballpark, or twelve straight strikes for a perfect 300, or a perfect par-five, and I'll be in seventh heaven. But when the perfect number is 4.3, and it's a grade point average at an Ivy League outpost known for making its students struggle and sweat--and I was once one of them--I'm perfectly ornery. Isn't envy ugly?

I've been sent on an excursion to find what I had always thought to be an academic impossibility--the perfect Cornell student. Better than excellent. A-plusses down the line. I accept the mission, but I can already feel my self-esteem perched like a lone tray at the crest of Libe Slope in February.

The quest includes questions: How does one achieve a better-than-an-A average, and why? What makes these people tick? Before commencing my search, I consult the psychological literature, thinking maybe it's something these superstudents would do. I discover that in 1968, researchers defined the "GPA perspective" as students and teachers giving greater importance to the grade point average than to critical learning or understanding the material, and that it was a product of "the grade-oriented academic environment in which they live." In 1988, a follow-up study confirmed that "students a) avoid classes that interest them if it threatens their GPA, b) do the minimum necessary for the GPA they want, and c) calculate the ways in which the various aspects of the university contribute to their 'making the grade.' " But in 1998, researchers have concluded that the perspective is fostered before college and that it involves "sacrificing health, personal relationships, hobbies, and other interests."

I fully expect the A-plussers on my agenda to maintain this imperfect perspective and suffer these imperfect side effects. Part of me--the part that couldn't even reach 4.3 if it were a 30-yard dash standard--sort of hopes so.

Saddled with these preconceptions, I look into the notion of perfectionism. The dictionary defines it as "an extreme or excessive striving for perfection, as in one's work." Perfection, in turn, is "an unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence." Returning to the psychologists, I find that they have hypothesized three types (nonperfectionists, healthy perfectionists, and dysfunctional perfectionists) and three major "dimensions" of perfectionism (self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially-prescribed).

I give a call to university registrar David Yeh, and he begins to comb through the databases to see if, indeed, he can locate a 4.3 on the Hill. Meanwhile, I canvass a list of near-perfect Cornellians. Let the search begin.

Want to be intimidated? How about starting your day by meeting a slightly manic pre-med varsity athlete with a double major in nutritional sciences and human biology, a minor in gerontology, six straight appearances on the Dean's List, and the highest GPA in the College of Human Ecology--a cumulative 4.07. And to top it all off, her name is Best. "When I first got here, my commitment was to play a sport at Cornell," explains Sara Best '99, her voice carrying through Schoellkopf House. "Academics weren't a priority. Okay, academics were a priority. But it wasn't like they were the only priority."

She was a straight-A student and a three-sport athlete in high school who arrived on the Hill with the intention of playing volleyball but quickly switched to crew. "Everyone said, 'You can't play a sport at Cornell and get As.' So I came here, and I'm like, 'I'm going to do this,'" she says. "I guess that was my goal, to show everyone. So I kind of just dived into everything and forced myself to survive."

The first semester on the Hill can be daunting to anyone. Students are adapting to a new environment, unfamiliar routines, harder course work. Best was no different. "My first semester was my worst one," she explains.

"Oh, really?" I say, feigning compassion. "What was your grade point average?"

"A 3.97," she deadpans. "Then I was really scared because spring semester was racing season for crew. I was like, 'Oh my God! I'm never going to survive. I'm never going to be able to do well!'"

She got a 4.05.

"People say I kind of cry wolf a lot," she admits. "I'll come back and say I did so bad on that exam . . ."

"And then you'll get a 97."

"Right. That kind of thing."

I tell her that's the very definition of irritating. She shrugs. "I never think I'm doing well until the grades come through."

On that note, I ask her if she considers herself a perfectionist, and she doesn't hesitate. "Yeah. Definitely. I can't hand something in if I don't think I gave one hundred percent. I just can't do it."

Indeed, she's the kind of person who, after becoming aware of the number of Spanish-speaking patients in New York area hospitals, followed her freshman year with a three-week summer pediatric internship in Guatemala, where she took a Spanish class in medical terminology. That's the kind of drive that puts plusses behind As, a grade Best received in such dreaded courses as Organic Chemistry and Physics 101 as a sophomore, when she compiled a 4.2 GPA. It's the kind of relentless focus that made her sleep two to three hours a night from October through March as a junior, while she studied for her MCATS and still surpassed a 4.0. And it's what allows her, as a senior, to juggle Monday or Friday interviews at some seventeen medical schools around the East, while competing as one of Cornell's top student-athletes.

"I feel like this semester I've been at a disadvantage because I haven't been able to go to class. I'm the kind of person who has to go to class all the time," she tells me. "And I'm a morning person, too. I try to schedule all my classes in the morning to get it all over with early."

I tell her I was just the opposite. In my undergraduate days, I was like Roseanne--not much class, and much more successful in prime time.

Want to be within spitting distance of a 4.3? Here's the Best system: Keep a very, very detailed daily planner. Start the year by recording every birthday, holiday, and exam. End each day by making a tomorrow to-do list. Don't sleep until the to-dos are just about done. Indeed, don't sleep much at all. Learn, in a freshman nutrition class, that athletes need less sleep and rationalize that to an extreme. Try to know the material for an exam two weeks before the test, and then commence hard-core studying one week before. Eat at least a banana and three bagels a day. Don't be exactly sure why. Don't wear high heels; wear sneakers. Don't bother with makeup or perfume. Join a sorority if you like, but don't be the social chair; be the scholarship chair. Sacrifice your love life.

"I always wanted a boyfriend, but I feel like those girls with boyfriends don't have enough time to study," says Best. "I figured if I had someone, it would just interfere with things. And if I have a relationship, I want to give it all I can." Disregard the love life rule, however, as Best has, if you encounter another 4.0 student from a different school while completing a summer internship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

More tips: On the rare occasion where you may go to a party until midnight, don't come home and go to sleep. Come home and study. Don't drink unless it's for a wines class. Be as competitive in the classroom as you are, say, on the rowing ergometer at 6 a.m. Be consistently academically insecure. ("I look around my classes and I think everyone is going to do better than me," says Best. "I feel like I'm not the smartest person in the room.") And make stress your friend. When people tell you to slow down, don't.

"Everyone says that to me, but I just keep wanting to do more," Best admits. "People always tell me: You do too much. You're psycho. You're crazy. But I don't know . . ."

"You know," I tell her, "you don't have to be stressed all the time. Life doesn't have to be about that."

"Yeah," she says, "but if I want to do everything that makes me happy, I have to be stressed."

"A Scout," says Jeremy Kubica '01, "is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Smart, too. And modest.

I'm at the Gun Hill apartments below University Avenue, talking to a sophomore engineer who says he finished second in his high school class and then adds, "The person who finished first was very bright." He tells me his GPA is "4.18 or something" and says, "I really don't follow it that closely." I ask him if he enrolled at Cornell expecting a parade of A-plusses. He shakes his head vehemently. "No. No. I wanted to pass. I pretty much figured I was going to be competing against a bunch of valedictorians from various high schools, and it was going to take a lot of work to stay afloat," he says. "So when I got my first grades back, I was like, Oh my God!"

Those grades included an A-minus, an A, and two A-plusses. In the spring, he improved to one A and four A-plusses. The success, he says, may be partly attributable to his days as an Eagle Scout and the fact that he was a senior patrol leader by ninth grade. You learn to manage things. Or perhaps it's the discipline he got from running track for four years in high school and his freshman year in college--sprints, pole vaults, miles, long hurdles, short hurdles. Or it could be that he'd already set his academic hurdles high back home in Rhode Island. "In high school, I treated my course work more like people do in college. I didn't realize that until I got here," says Kubica. "So it just carried over."

Whatever the reason, there doesn't seem to be anything unique about Kubica's routine. He doesn't keep a daily planner. He's not particularly organized. He goes out most weekends, if not out late. He even has a girlfriend. So what's his secret? "I guess I just try to actively learn, to figure out what problems mean beyond just equations," he says. "I try to keep myself on top of things as I go along, not so much as far as finishing up everything that's assigned, but knowing the material. If you study a little bit over a week, you learn a lot more than if you study a lot in one night."

I close the interrogation by asking Kubica the same question I asked Sara Best: Are you a perfectionist? "Probably. Probably too much so," he says and then pauses. "Not in all things, though . . . probably in academics . . . and I worked hard at track." He pauses again and laughs. "Okay, so maybe I am."

I pause here to consider the A-plus, and I wonder: a student can graduate with a better-than-an-A GPA on the Hill, but is the Hill unique? I make a few phone calls to faraway places like Palo Alto and Ann Arbor and discover that the answer may be yes. Stanford doesn't officially figure its students' grade point averages or class ranks; neither does Princeton. Brown doesn't compute GPAs either and doesn't even give any pluses and minuses, just A, B, C, and incomplete. Penn and Michigan use a system similar to Cornell's--3.3 for a B-plus, 3.7 for an A-minus, 4.0 for an A. The big difference: an A-plus as a Quaker or a Wolverine is still only a 4.0.

Finally, I call Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a fellow named Thurston explains Harvard's convoluted fifteen-point scale to me. "An A equals fifteen points," he says, "and an A-minus is fourteen. Then you skip thirteen. A B-plus is twelve, a B is eleven, a B-minus is ten, skip nine, a C-plus is eight, a C is seven, and so on."

"So where's the A-plus?" I ask.

"An A, for us, is a perfect grade," explains Senior Associate Registrar Thurston Smith. "I've been here fifteen years, and I think I've seen two students graduate with a perfect fifteen."

Cornell, however, offers points to recognize A-plus performance. So in theory, one can achieve a Big Red 4.3. But what about in practice? Are professors ultimately reluctant to hand out the ultimate grade?

"I don't like giving A-pluses," says David Dunning, an associate professor of psychology who teaches psychology and law to some 250 undergrads. "I only give out maybe two or three a year--at most four." Apparently, his grading system, like his class, is part psychology and part law. But perhaps it's a matter of perspective. Over in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Professor Fred Gouldin directs an experimental lab in fluid mechanics and heat transfer. His students must crunch the right numbers, but they are also graded on how they analyze and understand the information. Usually, four or five of them analyze and understand it to the tune of an A-plus, a mark Gouldin has no aversion to awarding. "If that's the grade," he says, "that's the grade."

Comparing the responses of the two professors, I feel like the psychologists in Annie Hall who ask about the frequency of a couple's sexual intimacy. "How often?" ask the shrinks. Woody Allen: "Hardly ever. Two or three times a week." Diane Keaton: "Constantly! Two or three times a week!"

Surmising that an A-plus is harder to come by in more subjective fields, I turn to Ciriaco Arroyo, the Hinchliff professor of Hispanic studies and comparative literature. He has been awarding grades since the days when students wrote "groovy" essays, yet he can only remember a handful of A-pluses over the years. "An A is already supposed to be 'excellent,'" he says, "and a B is still 'very good.'"

But that brings up a third question: does it really matter? Sure, there's a chasm between a 4.2 and a 3.2. But what about a 4.2 and 3.9? Does it make any difference if a student, angling for graduate school or a job, has crossed an imaginary line between unequivocal excellence and virtual perfection? The consensus seems to be, probably not. "At a certain point, outstanding is outstanding," says Judy Jensvold, senior associate director for health careers at the University Career Center. "Whether people are at 3.8, 3.9, or 4.0 and above, I don't see a lot of different things happening to them." She points to a chart that shows the percentage of students accepted to medical school within various GPA categories. The highest category is "3.9 plus." Dating back to 1994, 95 percent of students with a 3.9 or better have been accepted, compared to 93 percent of students with GPAs between 3.6 and 3.89, 61 percent between 3.2 and 3.59, and just 15 percent of applicants with an average below 3.2. This suggests that, at least in the pursuit of the stethoscope, there may be a bigger difference between an A-minus and a B-plus than between an A-minus and an A-plus.

What about Wall Street? Ken Fried '91, a vice president at Goldman, Sachs and Company, has been recruiting on Cornell's campus for five years. "Historically, and in general, we interview people with a 3.5 GPA or better," he says. "But if someone has a 3.2 and has various other outstanding qualifications, we'll probably interview them, too."

"But what about the A-plus students?" I ask Fried who, as an old fraternity brother of mine, is a big reason why I wasn't one of them. "I just went through 200 resumes two weeks ago," he replies, "and I remember one person had a 4.0. No one was higher than that." I can only conclude that some people are too smart to make big money. As I return to my search for the 4.3, I decide to adopt that as my personal rationalization.

Like Kubica, Ben Luk had modest expectations when he got to Ithaca. "Before I came here," he says, "I thought if I could do above the mean that's very good." Luk's standards have changed. Also a sophomore engineer, he took twenty credits of classes in his first semester, receiving three A-plusses and one A. He scheduled twenty-four credits the next semester. This time, it was four A-plusses and one A. Now he's shouldering a twenty-five-credit load--four computer science classes, Math 294, Physics 214, Architecture 131, and Psych 101. He plans to graduate in three years, while maintaining his 4.24 average.

I ask him the worst grade he's received at Cornell, and he tells me that in Math 293 last year he got stuck on one question during the second prelim and wound up with only an 84.

"But you still got an A-plus in the class," I point out. "How did you do that?"

His answer is matter-of-fact. "I got a 100 on the final."

Funny thing is, 84 was Luk's cumulative grade during secondary school in Hong Kong. It was enough to rank him first in his class of 230 students. But education is different there. No homework, no prelims, just finals. The exams are harder, he says. The daily grind is easier.

There, too, Luk was good enough to be a starting forward on the basketball team. Here, he's limited to intramurals. But one lesson carries over from sports to academics, Hong Kong to Ithaca. "What made me improve in basketball is my competitiveness," he claims. "I think academics are the same way. I try to beat others."

Besides competitiveness, Luk gives two reasons for his performance that I don't hear anywhere else. One is a sort of inverse peer pressure. He'd actually like to go out more, to have more of the social life he'd imagined when he first considered attending an American university, but all ten of the fellow Hong Kong natives he lives with in a cluster of three apartments plan to graduate in three years, too. Their social circle is small; their capacity for study is huge. So Luk studies too, though he claims to procrastinate. "This may be a shortcoming," he says.

The other reason for his effort can be found in the Chinese-language Bible on the table in front of him. Luk's Christian faith means the familiar one day of rest each week (in Luk's case, it's on Fridays, when he takes a breather and attends fellowship), and it also means striving for perfection. "If God gave me the ability to do that, then I can try my best," he says, "and put it in His hands."

I walk into Tony Cuadra's room at Sheldon Court, and the Smashing Pumpkins are playing on the stereo. An Austin Powers poster rests on one wall, Reservoir Dogs on another. Cuadra seems to be every bit your typical college student--except that he's a double major in electrical engineering and computer science who is already a junior after just one year on the Hill, he's planning on graduating in three years, and his 4.25 GPA is tops in his engineering class.

The son of Cuban immigrants who moved to Miami as teenagers, Cuadra spent his eleventh- and twelfth-grade years in the School for Advanced Studies at Miami-Dade Community College. That meant half his courses were at the college level, and he received an associate of arts degree a month before he earned his high school diploma. It also meant he entered Cornell with fifty-eight credits.

He was the third engineer in a row I had encountered in my search for academic perfection, which might come as a surprise to some. But as Cuadra points out to me about math and science, "If you get the right answers, you're going to get an A-plus. It's not up to the professor to decide."

Indeed, Cuadra, Luk, Kubica, and Best had one thing in common--all had received their lowest grades in their writing classes. (Often, the classes represented their only non-A-plusses.) Editing a paper isn't the same as rechecking a problem set, which is why Cuadra's key test-taking strategy revolves around simple persistence. "You have to not make any stupid mistakes," he explains. "So I end up going through a test two or three times if I have the time. I just stay until the last minute, no matter when I finish. Even if I think it's ridiculously easy, I'll stay and keep checking it until they force me to give them the test."

Cuadra debunked one finding of the "GPA perspective" researchers--that students avoid classes that interest them if it threatens their average. "I've taken the classes that I think are the best to learn what I need to know. And I'll try to get an A-plus in them," he says. "If I can't get an A-plus in that course, but maybe I would have in another course, I'm not going to regret taking the harder course."

He works hard for his grades, though, and that means sacrifices. He rarely goes out on Saturdays, doesn't have time for a girlfriend, has hardly touched his beloved guitar. When I ask him if he could work far less diligently and still pull, say, an A-minus average, he says, yeah, he probably could. But then he tells me this: "At career fairs, they've told me they're taking my resume and putting it in a separate pile. They say, 'Oh, we're going to hang on to this one.' And I know that's just from looking at my GPA."

He shrugs, and I'm thinking: maybe the researchers have been looking at the GPA perspective from the wrong side of the interview table.

I hike over to Balch Hall, where I stand in the archway and take stock of what I've found so far. All right, maybe these aren't the one-dimensional grade-mongers I'd imagined. Maybe there's more to them than numbers, and I'm the one mired in the "GPA perspective." It could be that perfection is a suitable goal after all, scorned only by the hopelessly imperfect.

It all crystallizes when the last subject of my quest appears and some digits (4.26 GPA) are replaced by dreams. Heather Clark is a junior in the College of Agriculture from Canton, New York, and she wants to change the world.

She always wanted to be an architect, but not your ordinary architect. Clark is an environmental crusader whose goals have evolved from designing buildings to creating environmentally sound communities. So she transferred from Rice University's School of Architecture into the Ag school, where she's a general studies major focusing on ecology, natural resources, architecture, and city and regional planning.

Clark is also an environmental artist, making sculptures out of trash found on railroad tracks or old juice box containers, and painting with leftover house paint collected from neighbors. She's a vegan, avoiding meat, dairy products, and leather. She's an activist who formed Cornell Students for Composting and spearheaded a successful campaign to install energy-efficient shower heads throughout Balch. She's a member of Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who refused to dissect a fetal pig and a squid in two basic biology courses. She still got the best grade in each class, a pair of A-plusses. In all, her first full year on the Hill yielded seven A-plusses and an A.

"I don't really care about that at all. I want to learn the stuff because I think it's so important. My goal is so important to me and I'm really driven towards it, so everything I learn I learn to the best of my abilities," she says. "I'm really so into the classes a lot deeper than they require. It turns out you get an A-plus for that. My views are more extreme than most people's. The veganism, the dissection thing, the environmentalism--all that stuff people tend to take less seriously. But maybe if I get good grades, those ideas can be more accepted."

Not that Clark doesn't have her own strategies for getting the grades. She treats her mind the way a world-class athlete treats her body. She's had single rooms the past two years, and she always sleeps from 11:30 to 8 a.m., weekends included. Only rarely is that schedule disrupted--for the occasional Bob Dylan concert or late-night phone call. She always tries to keep two weeks ahead of her assignments, creates schedules four days in advance, uses flashcards to study for exams. She doesn't go to parties, strictly avoids caffeine, and eschews television and movies during the school year. "I spend most of my time working," she says, "but when I do have time to relax I'd rather not do something passive. I'd rather interact with people."

I mention the notion of striving for perfection, and get a near-flawless response. "Perfect is a relative term. It depends what you're perfect in," she says. "I want to make perfect solutions. I want to make utopias. That's what my dream is all about."

Not long after talking to Clark, I receive word from the university registrar that his own search has revealed not a single 4.3 GPA on campus at the moment. Nobody, I'm told, is perfect. But there's no harm in trying.

Brad Herzog '90 is a frequent contributor to Cornell Magazine.

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.