TABLE 3.

Coding rubric for survey question 1: Please describe the hardest class you have ever taken (at college). What made it so rigorous?

Category	Definition and examples
Low preparation and interest	Students do not have an interest in the concept/course or do not have adequate preparation for the course.
High workload	Course requires a lot of time, especially out of class (especially with other people), assignments, reading, and information.
Quick pace	Course has too much content covered too quickly for a student to process.
Unclear importance	Students struggle with determining what is important; there are lots of facts to be memorized; facts don’t seem to “fit” anywhere to students. Disorganized course structure makes it hard for students to follow.
Lack of alignment	Assessments do not match content or approach in the class. Most of the grade depends on one or two ­assessments.
Low faculty support	Faculty do not appear to help and support students; lots of learning being done on their own (independent learning); lack of active-learning approaches; students receive little feedback on assessments for ­improvement.
High cognitive demanda	Material/content is more complex and requires critical thinking, application, analysis, synthesis, and/or evaluation.

^aIf students specifically mentioned a hard assignment and referenced cognitive demand (e.g., critical thinking), then we coded the response as “HCD” (high cognitive demand); if not, then we did not code that mentioning, as we could not tell what was “difficult” or “hard” about the assignment or what “hard” meant in this context.