Answers · The interview

Can I control the difficulty of the interview?

Indirectly but effectively, through duration, weights, custom questions and your instructions.

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  1. 1Understanding: can they explain and defend the reasoning?
  2. 2The two numbers must add up to 10.

There is no difficulty slider, because a number on a slider means nothing across a first-year seminar and a graduate methods course. The controls are more specific than that.

  • Duration. A 3-minute Mini stays on the surface; 10 or 15 minutes reaches the second and third follow-up, which is where depth actually lives.
  • Weights. Understanding-heavy interviews ask "why" and "what if"; authenticity-heavy ones ask "walk me through how you got here".
  • Custom questions. The most direct lever: write the hardest question you would ask in a viva and it gets asked.
  • Instructions. Viva calibrates to the task you describe. "Undergraduate intro lab" and "capstone research" produce visibly different conversations.
  • Grade level. K-12 classes (including IB and AP) get shorter, plainer questions about concrete choices; undergraduate work is expected to defend its claims; graduate work gets methodology and literature questions. The scrutiny is the same at every level. Only the register changes.
This is one page of the documentation inside Viva.

Instructors get the rest: the walkthroughs, the screenshots, and Ask Viva, which finds the right page from a typed question.