The act of redefining the conditions for victory or completion of a task, either when the original conditions for achieving them were met or whilst the person or group is busy working to achieve the current conditions, in order to prevent them from succeeding. Usually
done with malice by a
superior or peer looking to exclude or remove
people from a group by portraying them as incompetent of not completing the task they keep altering.
When Jake was close to finishing his training, his supervisor who had
always hated him started moving the goalposts by claiming that Jake needed four references of work experience instead of two in order to graduate, a condition that nobody else had to
meet and with only one
day left for the deadline. Jake didn't pass.