Right but we're mixing things * Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning? * Can a reader parse prose that uses more comp

Right but we're mixing things * Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning? * Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures? * Does the reader know a bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers? To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second. It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate. An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.