It's exactly like being good at academic test taking.
I'm very good at memorization (of facts, ideas/concepts, and procedures/algorithms) and that allowed me to do well in my younger years and in standardised testing, so I always just scoffed when I heard other people complain about how it was a poor proxy for knowledge / abilities.
Of course, now I'm terrible at pretty much all the standard ways of interviewing developers (...here's where you say I'm probably just a bad developer) and now I have all this past-due empathy for those I disregarded before.
I'm very good at memorization (of facts, ideas/concepts, and procedures/algorithms) and that allowed me to do well in my younger years and in standardised testing, so I always just scoffed when I heard other people complain about how it was a poor proxy for knowledge / abilities.
Of course, now I'm terrible at pretty much all the standard ways of interviewing developers (...here's where you say I'm probably just a bad developer) and now I have all this past-due empathy for those I disregarded before.