In Addition to fixing your bugs in your unit tests

Which bugs? Maybe you're not understanding what you should do, read the instructions again, and some of the comments in Discourse.

i.e. ["EAST", "NORTH", "EAST"] is the same as ["EAST", "EAST", "NORTH"]

No, because the path is different.

Write a function dirReduc which will take an array of strings and returns an array of strings with the needless directions removed (W<->E or S<->N side by side).

In Addition to fixing your bugs in your unit tests, you should make it to where any order of least directions is equivelent.

i.e. ["EAST", "NORTH", "EAST"] is the same as ["EAST", "EAST", "NORTH"]