Set up to fail: yes, that's the conclusion i came to a day after posting this. The authors of the paper knew what result they wanted and they chose the passage and the testing method to ensure that as many students as possible would do poorly so they would have a sensational headline grabbing, viral result to announce. Despicable.

Hemingway: He's one of the names that would occur to me if I was asked to suggest 20th century american authors who might present a challenge to struggling students for a reading skills test. But the paper writers chose a victorian from the pre-telegraph era because they wanted to make more students do badly by tripping them up with unfamiliar terminology and archaic constructions. Evil.