The sheet lying on Charlie’s* desk doesn’t hold any answers. The even rows of perfect ovals, five ovals per row, 150 rows per side, remain unmarked. In the upper right-hand corner of the page he has messily scribbled his name, and underneath that he has written the period number and the date. While on all sides of him students are huddled low over their papers, their foreheads creased in concentration as they fill the room with the methodical scratching sound of standardized testing, he leans back in his chair, dangling his No. 2 pencil loosely between his index and middle fingers. He is waiting for the teacher to turn around. He is waiting for an opportunity, he is waiting to graduate. Most of all, he is waiting for lunch.

Finally, the teacher ceases pacing the aisles and takes a seat in front of his computer. Charlie waits a few seconds, and then he leans casually towards his neighbor. She pretends not to notice. Her long hair falls in her face, and she impatiently brushes it away as she fills in yet another circle, this one nearly halfway down the page. Charlie’s eyes focus on question number one, and he turns back to his own paper. He fills in the bubble labeled C.

The teacher sits at his desk for the rest of the period, looking up once in a while to check for cheaters. Charlie is aware of this, and his operations are carefully timed. By the time the bell has rung, fifty five minutes later, every row of his scan-tron is filled in. He tosses it carelessly on the growing stack of tests that sit on the teacher’s desk and heads out to lunch.

I am talking to Charlie during fifth period, which is my elective and his free class. I order some coffee. He orders a sandwich.“That class is a joke,” Charlie tells me dismissively between mouthfuls of turkey, referring to the class in which he just had a test. “Nothing the teacher says is ever going to matter in my life. It’s a waste of my time.”

Charlie doesn’t care what some dead white guy did two hundred years ago. His history class lectures have no impact on his plans for the future, which include attending a four-year college and securing a career in business and hotel management. But he still has to take the history class. He still has to do hours of homework that he doesn’t care about and take quiz after quiz on subject matter that he feels he doesn’t need to know.

Charlie tells me that he could have spent hours studying last night. He could have even studied over the weekend. But doing that would have just taken away from the things he would much rather be doing, like playing sports and socializing.

I ask him what he would change, what would make him interested in doing schoolwork. His first response is flippant. “Well, you know, if I were the president of the world…” he begins. He pauses to think over his point. “I don’t know, I would make it more career-specific. If someone wanted to be a nurse, they would take more science classes; if someone wanted to be an artist, they would study art.”

He explains that, with six different classes, no one can care enough about one particular subject to truly excel; the goal is to get the work done, get the grade, and move on to the next period. State graduation requirements tell him what classes he has to take, and how many credits he needs of each; it doesn’t matter if he has no interest in learning the material. It doesn’t matter that, with no interest in learning the material, he has no interest in following the rules.

It’s a mindset that is everywhere in our society; get the good grades so you get into college, go to a good college so you can get a high-paying job, get a high-paying job so you can retire, retire so you can — and before you know it, you’re 70 years old and you’ve spent your whole life focusing on the future instead of the present.

It’s this standard, to get to the ends without regard to the means, that justifies cheating in most people’s minds, whether we’re talking about school or sports or CEOs. We all want to be the one who picks a couple numbers out of thin air and wins a million dollars. Embezzling is just a get-rich-quick plan, using steroids a way to raise your salary while putting in the smallest amount of effort; it seems like everywhere we look people are trying to cheat the system to generate the best results for the least work possible. In our busy, under-pressure lives, there’s always an excuse. Maybe you didn’t have time to study last night, but your semester grade depends on the test; maybe you just don’t care about the material, but you know that a 4.0 looks nice on a college application.

Charlie has just switched into Ms. Gunn’s first period math class, and he has no idea how to solve the problems on the test in front of him. He turns to his neighbor and asks him what he got for number one.

Charlie is unlucky, though; the teacher catches him and immediately takes away his test. He receives a big, fat zero and a reputation as a cheater among the administration.

Now, a year and a half later, Charlie reminisces on the incident with a laugh. “It was really a novice move, really looked down on in the cheating world,” he says. “Math teachers must talk, too, because every math teacher I’ve had since then has just mugged me during tests.”

The simplest method of cheating, he explains, is just looking at someone else’s paper; the strategy lies in choosing a seat next to someone who is smart enough to get the right answer but not so smart that they refuse to let you cheat off them.

Teachers will try and outsmart cheaters, he continues, by printing different tests and staggering them throughout the room; however, this is little more than an inconvenience to experts such as Charlie. “Right before you do anything, you just switch with someone, and then you have the same copy as everyone in your row,” he tells me. “They put different numbers and letters on them, version A, version B, so you’re just like OK, let me get version A.”

Charlie began seriously cheating in eighth grade, when he would steal the math tests off of the teacher’s desk and give them to the smartest kid in the class to solve during lunch, then take the test himself, having seen the correct answers already, the next period. “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” he tells me in mock-seriousness. But it’s true; the other kid is excited because he get to see the test beforehand, and Charlie gets his easy A.

In high school, Charlie finds that cheating is still the best way to get by. “When it’s easier not to study, why would I do it?” he asks rhetorically. “Especially when I know I’ll never use this again and I could be spending my time doing way better things than studying.”

There are three kinds of kids, Oscar* explains to me. The first kind is the kind that notices the cheater and doesn’t do anything. They glance up without making eye contact, and then awkwardly return to their own test. They pretend not to have seen you looking and they fill in the rest of their answers self-consciously, as if you’re watching their every move. They are careful not to block your view of their paper, and sometimes they even push it towards the corner of their desk so you can see it better.

The second kind, he continues, notices the cheater and, even though he pretends not to, tries to hide his answers. Sometimes they will turn slightly, so their back subtly obscures your view; other times they will lean casually forward, moving their arm so it just barely covers their answer sheet.

The third kind is simply oblivious. Buried in their test, they are unaware of their neighbor’s straying eyes. These kids, he says, are the best targets, so absorbed in their own work that they make no effort to hide their answers. There is no risk of being rebuked and a lower risk of both students being caught.

We’ve all been in that position, whether voluntarily or not, where we have to decide whether to help the person next to us who just can’t figure out the answer to question 12. And what does that say if the cheater gets a better grade?

Garfield senior William* blames the school district for a system that he believes to allow cheaters to succeed. It’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell situation, in a way; everyone does it, oftentimes teachers just look the other way, and only the clumsy ones get caught. It’s a system in which he says that “you can just sit in the back of the classroom and not pay attention for the entire year, and then cheat for the last three weeks of the semester and get the same grade as everyone else.”

I talked to one girl who was frustrated in how the system works when she scored lower on a test for which she had read the book than when she had sparknotesed it. Another girl put in hours of studying for finals and still did worse than her friends who had seen the test beforehand.

Garfield history teacher Richard Truax isn’t one to see cheating as a symbiotic relationship. “It’s like stealing,” he says. “You don’t go directly and pull something out of somebody’s wallet, but you are stealing from somebody in a way; the bottom line is you’re taking something away from somebody else.”

Of all of Garfield’s subcultures, the APP one is possibly the most perplexing. On paper, APP kids look like a college’s dream: overflowing with extracurriculars, advanced placement classes, and flawless test scores. But beneath their straight-A surface often lies a deceitful interior.

Maybe they just take their future for granted. They’ve been on the Advanced Placement route since they were little, they take harder classes than most of their peers, and it’s just expected that they will be accepted into competitive colleges. With pressure from their parents, their peers, and themselves, their grades become very important. There is a mindset of going to college, so its not even a question for them — they just have to do whatever it takes to get there, even if that means copying some answers or stealing a test.

Oscar has found out the hard way that it doesn’t pay to try and meet someone else’s expectations, whether of an overbearing parent or an Ivy League admissions officer. He doesn’t take a courseload of challenging subjects that don’t matter to him — instead, he focuses on his interests, like photography, art, and music. Since he discovered that, he has been a lot happier every day, and he looks to school as a place where he can practice things that he enjoys and a place where he can have fun. He is confident that he will find a college that fits right for him, but he doesn’t feel the need to conform himself to high-achieving standards for the sake of cheating his way into college.

Of course, he cheats all the time, too. Because frankly, who wants to do homework when it’s sunny outside?