Tuning SPAMASSASSIN

I am trying to tune Spamassassin but seem to be missing something. While server admin lets me set the the mail score to an integer value, that is insufficient. I edited /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf and made the 'required_hits' value 2.2 then did the postfix reload (although I am not sure that is really right but there is no reload for spamassassin I could find). I am now getting rejected mail with a score of 2.11 so obviously it is not really using my setting. Can someone help set this up properly? TIA.