Yes and No. Take a history exam, on the Cold War for example. Yes it is testing you ability to remember a large amount of information about the Cold War; Dates, Treaties, leaders and what not. But it also needs your understanding of the why they were important and how they fitted in the overall picture. A teacher might be able to tell you it, but it takes real understanding of the topic to do it well enough and demonstrate original thought.
In an English exam you might remember the teacher said that in Lord of the Flies the island was a microcosm of the war happening around it but if you have no examples to back this up from the literature and can't explain why it reinforces your claim then you won't get very high marks.
Also in Maths you learn a method and have to apply it to sort out questions you have never seen, which is not merely a memory test.