The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of the contingency manager (teacher or pupil) on a pupil's academic response rate. The results of two such experiments disclosed that higher academic rates occurred when the pupil arranged the contingency requirements than when the teacher specified them. A third study manipulated only reinforcement magnitude to ascertain whether amount of reinforcement had interacted with pupil‐specified contingencies to produce the increase in academic response rate. The latter findings revealed that the contingency manager, not reinforcement magnitude, accounted for this subject's gain in performanc