You're presuming that this test run 40 years ago would have different results and I don't think that's a safe presumption.

My mother taught college-level biology, physiology, anatomy and microbiology for 20 years. My father taught physics in the Peace Corps. My mother didn't disagree with my father's assertion that one week ahead of your students is far enough when you're teaching the rudiments; every time she taught a new course she had to learn a new course.

The authors don't name "Kansas Regional Universities" 1 and 2 but considering two of the three teach at Pitt, it's a safe bet Pitt is one of them. If you check their notable alumni you see a lot of football players. Here's where the students were on "a ton of books that weren't part of their educational curriculum":

Each taped reading test began with a brief questionnaire in which subjects were asked to give authors and titles of specific nineteenth-century American and British literary works and to explain briefly what they knew about nineteenth-century American and British history and culture. The purpose of these questions was to see how much literary and/or cultural knowledge the subjects possessed. According to Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent on one’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged” (69). With Bleak House, this knowledge is crucial.

The results from the questionnaire revealed that most of these subjects could not rely on previous knowledge to help them with Bleak House; in fact, they could not remember much of what they had studied in previous or current English classes. When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not [End Page 4] access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was. These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into their long-term memories.

You're talkin' undergrad English majors at a party school who were not answering quiz questions, they were jawboning about Dickens with peers:

Our next step was the individual think-aloud study. Each subject was tested in a private, one-on-one taped 20-minute session with a facilitator. We made sure that the facilitators were not familiar with the specific subjects whom they were testing. For the KRU1 study, the facilitators were English graduate students; for the KRU2 study, the facilitators were English undergraduate students from KRU1. During the sessions, subjects were asked to read out loud and then translate each sentence of the passage from Bleak House. Subjects were encouraged to go at their own pace and were not required to finish the entire passage. Those who were uncomfortable reading out loud had the option to read silently.

Because we wanted to see how well students could read a complex text on their own, we told the facilitators not to help the subjects interpret the text. Instead, facilitators were there to record how subjects were understanding the material and to stop them every few sentences to request an interpretation. The taped recordings show that facilitators followed this training and politely refused any request for help from subjects. Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. If subjects did go to Google or an outside website for help, the facilitator recorded that fact. At the end of each reading study, the facilitator asked each subject a brief series of questions on what the subject thought would happen next and their comfort level in reading the rest of the novel. These questions were designed to see how well our subjects understood the passage and how they perceived their own success with reading the text. All responded that they believed that they could read the rest of Bleak House with no problem.

A follow-up study would be to see if the results are the same with a proctor outside their peer group. 'cuz I tell you what, I'ma slag on Dickens hella less if my conversational counterpart has patches on his elbows.