But that's just it, Puffin. They don't pick trivial details. They pick obvious elements and primary themes from the story that you would have to either not have read or not comprehend to miss. My daughter has never failed one of the tests yet. Neither has one of my little twins.
About pronouncing words wrong, if the issue with the child advancing to the next reading level is phonics...? What was happening is my daughter did not learn to read by phonics. She was an early reader (3) and I didn't know what I was doing. I read to all four kids at once, with the book upside down in my lap so they could all see the pictures. She took a mental picture of each word, and memorized what I said the word was. This worked great when she was reading Outloud, or when I was reading Outloud. But once she started reading silently (5), I was not there to tell her the correct way to say the word. So, then she goes and takes the schools STar Literacy tests and she applied her own (phonics) to the test, thinking of how she would say that word based on memorizing similar words. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not. We wound up taking her k class summer and comprehensively teaching her phonics and it's not been a problem again.
But, as far as reading words you can decode but don't understand, this doesn't make sense to me ither, maybe I am missing something. My youngest twin is hyperlexic. He could read German at age four if handed to him, perfectly getting the phonics. How would this have benefitted him? He would not have understood what he read. In the same way, we waited until his understanding caught up with his phonics skills before sending him ahead in books. And sadly, he has lost most of hat hyperlexia which I read happens with children who are hyperlexic but not autistic. He still reads about four grades ahead though, so we are happy.
