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.
Some people just have the knack, interest and understanding for certain subjects. Math, being mostly deterministic, can be really difficult for many, while some just happen to understand what’s going on.
Now, I wasn’t into financial math, but I did start learning the basics of geometry, trigonometry, and even the basic fundamentals of Calculus, all on my own, at the age of 10. I was also learning to respoke bicycle rims at home, so the subjects of circles and trigonometry were especially of interest to me at the time.
By the time the school bothered even starting to cover these subjects, I was already writing my own 3D graphics rendering engine at home. My Calculus 2 teacher told me that when I first came into his class, I already had a fair good understanding up through Calculus 4.
TL;DR - Some people struggle to simply memorize things, while others tend to just understand things.