Right, but I’m asking what does it mean for a reading to be “written correctly”? I had kind of assumed that the point of readings was to teach and test spoken language, but that seems not to be the case.
So in short, the dash「－」 is only used in katakana and this word should be written with it 
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Well, because some written expressions of a kanji’s reading are correct, and others are wrong. For 難しい, for example, むずかしい is correct, and むづかしい is not. They both sound the same, but WaniKani would be doing us a disservice if they accepted the latter on the grounds that it’s one way to represent the correct reading of the word.
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Is WaniKani testing the reading, or “the written expression of the reading”? Or are those two things, by definition, the same? If you asked me in person to give you the reading of 難しい, and I responded orally, would you need me to spell it in order to tell if I had gotten it right?
EDIT: The way WK does it is actually a bummer for me, because I have to remember to type “tsudu” for “tsuzu” for 続, and I find myself inclined to mispronounce it as a result.
This isn’t on WK, that’s just how IMEs work. There’s no way around it if you want to learn Japanese.
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To address your the last point, you’re thinking about it from an English language point of view. Japanese people will think of t+u typed on the keyboard (at least in the context of Japanese) as the sound “tsu” and likewise for d+u (zu), t+i (chi) and s+i (shi).
ETA: Because there are no sounds in Japanese like “Tea”, “Two”, “See”, or “Due”. (Obligatory caveat: katakana spellings can be convoluted to accommodate a nearer approximation of foreign pronunciations.)
To address your first point, I think obviously WK is testing the correct rendering of the reading in hiragana.
And in the case of ビー玉 it just so happens that a quirk of the system meant to offer convenience means a technically nonstandard rendering of the word can be accepted as correct.
But I don’t fully understand the confusion because WK isn’t doing anything odd by calling this the “reading.” In Japanese it would be called the 読み方 and that’s basically a literal translation.
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Yes, “reading” isn’t generally used this way in English (to mean the pronunciation of a word), but in Japanese it is (読み方). So we use it in English to represent the way kanji are pronounced. Since it doesn’t make much sense to ask how you spell a reading, just take it as a given that you are being asked how to phonetically represent the the kanji/vocabulary item in a way that Japanese people would recognize as correct (I’m running out of ways to say this). With, as Leebo pointed out, the convenience of being able to use hiragana in place of katakana.
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Got it. I wanted to conflate “reading” with “pronunciation” but in Japanese it really means something more like “kana-spelling.” The whole thing seems profoundly silly to me (having multiple kana that are pronounced exactly the same, and rigidly codifying the “spelling” of phonetic representations), but as a native speaker of English I’m in no position to throw shade on other languages for their illogic. 
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They’re not pronounced the same in all dialects, and they weren’t pronounced the same when they were developed, so as always, languages evolve and vestiges are left in place.
Well, WaniKani could choose to test the phonetic pronunciation rather than the kana spelling, especially since I’m typing in romaji in the first place.
I’m not saying they should do that–I understand why they chose to do it this way–but it is a choice that WK is making, so it’s “on WK” in that sense.
Your English seems fine, proving you’re smart enough to learn a language. I’m willing to bet you have some embarrassing memory from learning your native language, too.
Getting something wrong just means it’s time to study it again, not that you’re bad at learning. These aren’t tests.
Japanese and English are supposed to be the hardest languages in the world (depending on where your native language is from) and you already know one of them. Don’t stress and keep going!
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