My impression is that the SATs measure some combination of reasoning ability and retention of knowledge: I can see the latter being correlated with conscientiousness, but there are other ways to get it. As best I can tell, in college admissions the combination of a high SAT score and middling grades is taken to indicate a low-conscientiousness student, which if correct isn’t what we’d expect if the SATs rewarded the two equally. If it’s not correct, I’m not sure what it’d be measuring instead.
My impression is that the SATs measure some combination of reasoning ability and retention of knowledge: I can see the latter being correlated with conscientiousness, but there are other ways to get it. As best I can tell, in college admissions the combination of a high SAT score and middling grades is taken to indicate a low-conscientiousness student, which if correct isn’t what we’d expect if the SATs rewarded the two equally. If it’s not correct, I’m not sure what it’d be measuring instead.