The real question should be: Is it a logically justifiable rule to have the staple at a certain number of degrees? As a calculus professor, I'm sure the question of "how far does a staple have to be from 45 degrees to warrant a point dock?" has crossed his/her mind at least once. (For the sake of this post I will assume a normal calculus professor who, although completely able to, hasn't done any detailed studies about staple placement. If so, all bets are off.)

The current philosophy is, that whatever rules the professor sets up, are the end-all, be-all of the course (unless they violate some other, larger rules e.g. if the prof's rules were racially discriminatory.)

This system doesn't take into account the actual validity of the request at all, let alone attempt to discern from what motives the request comes from, which many argue can often shed some important light on the actual validity of a especially when making quick decisions. The system, it seems to me, is thus saying, "Okay, because you've done enough of the things we the organization approve of in the past, then we are going to apply less scrutiny to your rule-making in completely unrelated matters than we would apply to the rule-making of someone who just joined our organization." By contrast, this is obviously a necessary and correct thing to do in specialist areas where someone who has moved up the organization actually probably has more relevant knowledge than the new recruit and thus can probably make logically more justifiable, and thus intrinsically better, decisions. This is really the main reason why we promote people in the first place. But should this distinction automatically give such a person a right to decide with similar authority in regions where they do not have the same level of expertise? It would seem the default answer is no, otherwise that would necessarily imply that such expertise is trivial and can be easily approximated by gaining expertise in slightly- or non-related fields. If you feel the opposite way, why is that?

For example, if the TA were the party who were adamant about the angle of the staples, he or she would not have an instantly actionable method of recourse (here, the docking of points) if someone violated this behaviour - in fact, the TA would often have to refer to the professor's "discretion" in such a case. This is problematic because a hypothetical -professor's- reasoning for not having the staple at 45 degrees is probably not that different and *especially** not any more based in objective logic* as a hypothetical -TA's- argument for the staple being at 45 degrees, as demonstrated above.

Caveat: I realise that in all, this is probably a bad example, in that it is unlikely the professor sees the homework at all, and that it is probably in fact the TA who suggested this rule. But it still is an obvious logical inconsistency that the hypothetical TA would have to refer to the hypothetical professor in this instance, when neither knows that much more than the other about staples. (I would also have to explicitly define how much more knowledge/experience is enough to satisfy this criterion. And doing such is really my entire point. Leaving it up in the air is simply illogical.)