Is your first language French ?
No. Although I know a few tricks like: any word ending in "-tion" is valid and means the same in French and English. Back to the point, I simply meant that the computer exams I took rarely asked anything specific about language features. They were usually things stated in plain language like "Write software to find all the twin prime numbers" or something else easily stated. I remember one professor saying "If we type your code in, exactly as you write it, and it gets the right result, you get 100% for that question. Otherwise we grant partial marks for how close we think your code was to the correct answer."
No, nor should they, because languages come and go all the time. But they should tend to test students on generalised principles common to all programming languages of a given type, and these all come with lists of terms and definitions one would need to memorise. (That's not to say specific languages aren't used to put theory into practice, of course.)
So even this question is testing that one knows/understands what a prime number is, then what a twin prime is. It's also a trick question as it is impossible to find all twin primes regardless of how one tries to go about it.
I'm confused, however, how they could ask you to write software if they specifically avoided teaching any programming languages, or could one use any language one wished ? And if no programming languages were taught, was a pre-existing knowledge of one or more languages a pre-requisite for the course ?
Is what you're describing part of a computer-science degree (or major or whatever), or a class supplementing another area of study for academic credits ? I don't know how things work in Canada.
The example I gave of finding twin primes was just an example I made up in my head now to make a point. A more realistic question would have been more like this, "given a smooth and continuous function F(x), write code [in the language of this course] that will find as many of its roots as you can." Do you know how to find roots of a function using linear analysis? I had to.
But I think that would have distracted from the point I was making, which was that the question was usually plain English words which didn't cite any of the language features we were being tested in. You had to know how to code any of the things you learned in the Numerical Algebra and Numerical Analysis courses.
In the end I rarely used any of that advanced knowledge throughout the rest of my life. Basically I just became a system builder and sysadmin.
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The point is that even that would have required you to have memorized the commands of that language, or wasted considerable time looking up every command (if it was open book).
So to be an effective, productive software developer, you still need to memorize as least the basics of the language of choice. Good IDEs can really help, but you have to start with knowing something. 
I didn't deny that there was anything to memorize. What I actually said above was that there was "much less to memorize." My statement was a comparison/relative statement. I guess it's my prerogative, as the one who made the statement, to pick a subject that has more to memorize that a computer language course. How about medicine?