#pbl-guide # Challenge As an educator, the word "rigor" can illicit a guttural cringe response. When brought up by a consultant or administrator, it can make feel like they doubt your understanding of your students. **Obviously**, all teachers are going to give content to their students they believe is at an appropriate level to push them forward. However… it is equally important that the *student understands* the challenge, or rigor, of a class. If a class or project seems too easy, it will move down the student's priority list so far they'll forget to do it. Or at least far enough that they'll procrastinate until there is no time to learn, try, or produce anything interesting or meaningful. It, like everything else in project design, is a balancing act. If it seems too hard, students will give up before they really try. If it seems too easy, they will give a disproportionally smaller effort. Here, let's explore some of the levers you can adjust to control how challenging a project *seems* to a student. ## The Timeline Perhaps the most straight-forward lever you can pull is that of the timeline. No content has to change. The students do the same project with the same criteria. Restricting the amount of time that students have (obviously, to a point) can make them work drastically harder because they feel the pressure to get it done. There's no time to waste. They have no choice but to get it done. ## The Criteria Here at the pbl.guide, we're big fans of the Single-Point rubric. We also will commonly take the categories from a single-point rubric and write them as a checklist of project requirements. However you communicate what you'll be evaluating, you can use it to alter how difficult a project *seems*. Did you write your criteria to be open-ended, allowing for more student choice? Non-specific instructions can come across as simpler (and therefore, easier) to students. Did you use technical language in your criteria? They sound hard now. Write too many and there's too much to do. Write too few and they *must* be able to do the project in, like, a day… right? ## The Supports This may be the only part of this page that I should be writing. Counter-intuitively, if you give students too much support, it can feel like they have too much work. They will also (as you know) feel like the class is too hard and disengage if they don't feel supported enough. So, it's worth identifying what activities, experiences, and assignments you can add or remove from your plan in order to calibrate how challenging the project feels. Hey, and here's a crazy idea: if you've cancelled an assignment or have one planned that not everyone needs, you can still offer it to students as optional. Students who are feeling like they need more direction can do it, and you don't have to worry about grading it because it wasn't required.