For instance, as a counter example, if you wired your brain up to a hard drive loaded with an immense amount of medical data that you'd be able to access at will for the rest of your life (instead of learning most of that rote knowledge through traditional sources) I wouldn't consider that cheating. Assuming you're still sufficiently good at critical thinking and problem solving then I wouldn't really have any objection to a doctor who keeps his knowledge of the krebs cycle on an instantly accessible external storage device.

I would expect some of this exam is not about rote information but requires actual problem solving. E.g.: patient has XYZ symptoms, what is your diagnosis?

By analogy, bringing all the printed books or hard drives you want into a chess match might help you with the opening, but not the rest of the game. These days there are chess engines, but before that, cheating required a human accomplice who was a good player, who knew what was on your board and could tell you the right move. My old club had an incident of a guy doing that using hand signals.

Now they won't let you bring any devices at all into chess tournaments, even mechanical wristwatches. A pity. Garry Kasparov famously used to fidget with his watch while playing. You could tell how good his game was by noticing whether the watch was on his wrist or on the table.

Treating any sort of complex medical condition requires a physician to actually understand the biochemistry, including interactions between multiple pathways. Having ready access to reference sources isn't sufficient. This is why medical schools involve a lot more than rote memorization.

So if your doctor spent sufficient time studying those complex interactions and didn't waste time on the rote memorization - would you consider them ill-equipped? If this student's learning could be more focused on the problem solving side of things would you think they'd make a worse doctor?

A competent physician needs to spend sufficient time on rote memorization and then use that as a foundation to understand complex interactions. This is why medical school and residency takes so long. There are no good shortcuts.

This is an apples to oranges comparison of course - but good developers spend time in university learning a whole bunch of theory and problem solving and almost nothing on rote learning (outside of how to find information which is a skill - while the information you're finding isn't one).

Perhaps the medical field is radically different - but I'd wager there's a whole lot of benefit that's been delivered to healthcare by giving doctors access to the internet so they don't need to focus so much of their time on trying to recall vague facts from twenty years prior in school and residencies.

Many specialties in the medical field are radically different. Physicians simply don't have time to look things up during a typical 10 minute outpatient encounter, or in the middle of a surgical procedure. The time pressure is just way more intense than what most developers ever deal with.