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Me either, especially because there's plenty of ways to deal with it without basically admitting that you're using grades as a disciplinary measure. For crying out loud, just make class participation part of the grade, and give an F on that portion to the kid who falls asleep.

Grades should be used as leverage over student behavior. When I was a TA teaching 3rd year undergraduate chemistry labs, I had a very strict safety policy. At the end of the lab period, if the lab wasn't as clean as it was at the beginning of the lab, all the students took a 5% hit on their grades. It needed to be done. Even after demonstrating proper chemical handling and explicity going over the lab safety requirements, the students still managed to get strong acids and hazardous solvents over everything through sloppiness. I could not believe how they could contaminate and entire room in les than 10 minutes! It was very fortunate no one was injured. After I put that policy in place, the lab was spotless from then on. One student complained that they were being treated like kids and I simply told him that they were acting like kids the way they handled things and I was punishing everyone for what only a few people did. I had to remind them that lab safety resides with everyone and it is only as strong as the weakest link. If you se a safety problem in the lab, even if you did not cause it, you are responsible for getting it corrected. Also the university I taught at had a very strict policy on safety. If you didn't have your safety gear with you, you weren't allowed in the room and you got a zero for the assignment.

When I was a TA teaching 3rd year undergraduate chemistry labs, I had a very strict safety policy. At the end of the lab period, if the lab wasn't as clean as it was at the beginning of the lab, all the students took a 5% hit on their grades. It needed to be done.

I agree, but that policy is different, IMO. You can certainly make a case that safety and equipment care is a necessary and proper part of chemistry lab, and that students who do not learn that lesson should be penalized for not learning the material. However, reducing the grade for an assignment for something that's fundamentally unrelated to the assignment is improper, and not justifiable. Talking during the chemistry lecture is certainly rude, and worthy of punishment, but there is no reason for that punishment to take the form of a deduction on the gas chromatography lab assignment. The one thing has nothing to do with the other thing, and it appears - is, really - blatantly arbitrary to mete out punishment in such a fashion.