Lisa B. Schwartz ’03 has managed to achieve what most students consider impossible.

Over her four years at Harvard, Schwartz did not receive a single grade lower than an A—not even an A-minus, giving her a perfect 15.0 grade point average on Harvard’s 15 point scale.

Schwartz, also a Crimson editor, will receive the Sophia Fruend prize today, an honor awarded each year to the highest ranked summa cum laude graduate in the College.

But unlike most recipients of the award, Schwartz has a perfect academic record. The last person to earn this distinction was Lisa’s older brother Kevin S. Schwartz ’01, who was the first undergraduate in nearly 20 years to achieve such perfection.

Schwartz said that while she was proud of her brother when he won the award, she never felt pressure to repeat his success.

“I knew it was most important that I make the most of my own experiences at Harvard, so I never made it a goal to set any records,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz, who is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in government, said she took a wide variety of classes and tried to challenge herself academically.

“I’ve loved my time at Harvard,” Schwartz said. “[I] feel that I’ve learned something from all aspects of my experience here, so it’s definitely is a nice honor.”

Fellow students, advisors and professors were not surprised to hear of Schwartz’s perfect record.

Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Maria M. Tatar predicted such a feat was within Schwartz’s reach during her freshman year when she took Tatar’s core class “Fairy Tales, Children’s Literature and the Culture of Childhood.”

“Lisa is a natural in the academic world, achieving the impossible with power, control, rigor and real style,” Tatar said.

In addition to winning the Fruend Prize, Schwartz is also a Truman Scholar and is a member of the USA Today College Academic First Team.

“Lisa is such a self-starter and so motivated,” said Andrea L. Campbell ’88, an assistant professor of government and Schwartz’s thesis advisor.

Schwartz wrote her senior thesis on the little-known U.S. Judicial Conference, which makes policy for the federal justice system. The Conference is composed of the Supreme Court’s chief justice and other top federal judges.

Campbell said that Schwartz’s thesis, which she called “extraordinary,” dealt with a topic that few have studied. “It could easily be published as a book,” Campbell said.