I was a great test taker, I used to make a sort of game out finishing tests in half the time as almost everybody else and acing it at the same time. I also never crammed, never attended pre-test study groups, and sometimes made a show of drinking beers right before the test just to annoy the people cramming in the last minute.

But I'm not particularly brilliant, in fact I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I have undiagnosed ADHD. My test taking performance trick, which I freely told everybody to their annoyance, was very simple. I knew the material! Read the assigned texts, do the optional homework, pay attention in class. If you know the material you don't have to try to cram it into your brain in the last half hour before the test. If you know the material you don't have to try to reason it out from first principles during the test. You just go in, fill out the easy answers straight away, go back and do a second pass for the tricky questions, and that's it. If you have to sit there wracking your brain for 30 minutes on a single problem it's because you already fucked up with how you approached the course weeks ago.

Again, I'm not special for this. There were a handful of other students who were as fast as me. We'd sit in the hall waiting for our friends, look at each other and say "you knew all this stuff too, huh?" "yeah of course"