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When National Honor Society members met in January, senior president Jonah Kupritz proposed the idea of dealing with academic dishonesty at Park.

Kupritz said the National Honor Society’s (NHS) plan consists of additional research on how the school’s academic policy deals with issues of cheating.

“We are basically working on rewriting the school’s policy of identifying and dealing with academic dishonesty,” Kupritz said.

NHS adviser Jenny Magdal said academic honesty has high importance when it comes to success.

“A person’s integrity is far more important than any grade they could ever receive,” Magdal said.

Senior NHS vice president Madison Vignes said NHS wants to fix the issue of academic dishonesty because it corresponds with two of the four pillars of NHS honor and scholarship. She also said it helps NHS make an impactful change for the school.

“I think focusing on academic honesty is important for NHS because two of the pillars are honor and scholarship, and as a school group we are supposed to set examples for others,” Vignes said.

Senior NHS secretary Jessica Schmidt said academic dishonesty can interfere with a student’s chance of learning during school.

“Academic dishonesty prevents students from their full learning potential,” Schmidt. “To make our school stronger, it is important that we address this issue.”

Vignes said Park can stop academic dishonesty by decreasing the amount of students who cheat and creating ways for students and teachers to report incidents.

“Students can first make sure that they are not partaking in actual cheating, but also both students and teachers can make sure they report and enforce policies about academic dishonesty,” Vignes said.

Schmidt said reporting the issue of academic dishonesty differs for students and teachers.

“That’s part of what’s tough about addressing it, because for the students it is very personal. You have to be motivated to take pride in your work and as students it’s so easy to get caught up in the grade,” Schmidt said. “With teachers, if they had a academic dishonesty guideline or something to follow directly, that might be easier for them to address it with.”

Schmidt said NHS will continue to move forward in fixing academic dishonesty within Park.

“Right now we are working on addressing the issue and then we will move to what would be a way to assess the situation and how we will fix it. Then we will move to administration and see how they can help us implement it,” Schmidt said.