Yes, exams are not ultimate indicator of examinee's intelligence. Generally, exams are so concentrated around concrete concepts and amount of knowledge fed in the student's brain which is tested in terms of amount of words wrote on paper and use of vocabulary with some other related criterion. Exams could be a possible close indicator of one's intelligence if it is based on application based questions. This means that if the exams are intended to access examinee's sense of firm understanding of concepts by checking it in terms of application level questions, this could give a close assessment of intelligence level.