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’ll give you my experience with this:
I don’t quite have a photographic memory but I’d say it’s reasonably close in terms of written text. If I pick up a textbook and read it, I can re-read the pages in my head at any point during that test to try to figure out the answer. For tests where all I have to do is recall and write down info, this works really well. For tests where the information needs to be applied to a problem, it helps but doesn’t always work perfectly, and here’s where I need to use my brain to try to “translate” the book knowledge to apply to the specific question.
I usually studied for 2-3 hours, did a handful of practice questions, then went and got 85%+ on all my Uni final exams. I did sit through lectures, because they were mandatory, but I rarely paid attention, and my verbal recall is terrible compared to what I see written down. I didn’t take a single note in university though, because usually between the textbook and the slides I had everything I needed.
Same deal here, but with a strange twist in my case. I have absolutely terrible short term memory, stuff barely commits to long term, but if it does I can remember it exactly as if I’d just seen it. Makes it very hard to explain why I know the exact position of a USB cable I put away 2 years ago but still can’t reliably find where I set my keys