"A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby."

I wonder if the test conditions are to blame. In real life, if you don't know a word then you look it up in a dictionary. It takes a few seconds, and you always have a dictionary with you (a smart phone). If you don't know a concept then you can look it up in Wikipedia. Rugby is an unpopular sport in the US, so I think it's reasonable that a sixth-grader hadn't heard of it. For a general reading test, and not specifically a vocabulary test, I think she should have been allowed to look up a definition. Are dictionaries generally allowed in reading tests?