move the goalposts
B2CEFR level
40/100Rarity: uncommon
NeutralRegister
To unfairly change the rules or conditions of something while it is still in progress.
Just as we hit our targets, management moved the goalposts and demanded twenty per cent more.
Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.
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