With the aim of developing an assessment more appropriate for low-income countries, in 2013 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development initiated the Programme for International Student Assessment for Development (PISA-D). Designed as a one-off assessment project resulting in scores comparable to PISA, nine countries joined the project. In this article, we focus on whether PISA-D does what it sets out to do, namely, appropriately measure the specified content in the selected populations. In particular, we investigate the degree to which PISA-D is well-suited for measuring low-performing educational systems. To that end, we detail how well the modifications designed to make PISA-D an "easy" instrument capture assessed populations. We conclude the article with policy implications of our findings.