Four Years of 4.0

Daisy Frances Hilse, 20, a cheerful, brown-eyed brunette, did not systemati cally set out to score top grades when she entered New York City's scholastically stern Hunter College. "I just hap pened to like all my subjects," she says. She liked them enough so that the A's--44 of them in all -- just kept piling up. Last week Daisy became the first grad uate in Hunter history to score a perfect 4.0 rating through all four years.

Academically, a perfect 4.0 is about as rare in colleges as a .400 batting average is in pro baseball. Nonetheless, Daisy's achievement was matched by other summa cum laudes at major universities in the class of '66. Bruce A. Wooley, a University of California electronics engineering student, racked up three years of 4.0 at Berkeley after an unblemished year at the University of Arizona. Thomas J. Messenger had perfect marks as a physical chemistry major at the University of Michigan. Air Force Veteran George Chartier, a 30-year-old psychology major, completed straight-A work at the University of Illinois' Urbana campus. So did David Lee Karney at the University of Texas and Roberta Bernstein at the University of Massachusetts.

No Secrets. How did they do it? "I just do the work until it's done," says Berkeley's Wooley. Daisy Hilse found no short cuts, employed no secrets. She took copious notes in her lectures, concentrated only on "doing well." She studied hard, but never past midnight, because "I get too tired." Her string of A's actually worried her, since "grade-grubbing is not a particularly healthy attitude toward education." She con fesses that she "might have been relieved if I had gotten a B or a C."

Far from being a grind, Daisy sings in a Lutheran church choir, takes lessons in both voice and piano. Her father, who died in 1964, was a composer, conductor and pianist. Her mother teaches piano, and her brother Walter topped his class at Columbia University in 1962. Mrs. Hilse says, not immodestly, that Daisy's scholarship "just comes naturally."

Daisy majored in mathematics and minored in anthropology, turned out a 60-page honors thesis on the effect of warfare upon the social organization of the Tuareg cattle herders in the Sahara. Yet she was equally proficient in courses ranging from Schiller to statistics. She has won a Woodrovv Wilson Fellowship, which she will use to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology at Yale. There, she assumes, her succession of A's "will all be over." But no one who knows Daisy will bet on that.

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