It’s currently university exam season in my country. My roommate has quite literally not come to university at all the entire semester except for mandatory stuff; hasn’t studied at all, doesn’t even have the coursework, 0 notebooks or folders, etc. We’re more than half done with the exam session and he got 10/10 (max grade) at each exam. He just read through my coursework the day before the exam for a bit & that was it. When I ask him he says he uses intuition, logic and reading between the lines to understand the “patterns”. I just don’t understand how you can use “intuition” for microeconomics & math applied in economics for example. I know for a fact he doesn’t cheat cause in his mind cheating is too much effort.
I can attest and as you put its particularly for people who can memorize short term. Im sorta the opposite and you would think that would have let go the higher up you go but it kinda gets the opposite were so many people have dropped out that now you have a curve with pretty solid people in the major and your score in relation to the crowd can be just a few questions. The immunology professor also had a reputation for hard tests and almost had a small mutiny on his hands and alls he really did was change the values year to year so you could just straight out memorize previous years tests. I imagine this is not as much the case in math too unless the professors are really lazy but up to the math I had I did not see any advantage for people with good short term memory. This also is experiences from the early nineties in college. So its been a thing for awhile.