Students wouldn't attend your class unless you deducted points for absences. I wondered what else needed to be linked to the grade. Did the course syllabus need to spell out that for each instance of rude behavior a student's grade would be docked so many points? I began to regard the syllabus less as an outline of the course content than as a legal contract. Besides content, you had to specify appropriate behavior in a college classroom, and then create an elaborate system of penalties and bonuses in order to elicit appropriate behavior from students. page 15