Ask HN: Interviewing and Rote Educational Backgrounds

I recently went through a round of software developer interviews and detected a slight pattern. It seemed to me that when the interviewer came from a country where rote learning is the norm, the questions tended to be more geared towards a right or wrong answer. In contrast, the other strain of interviewers asked much more conversational, open-ended questions and tolerated a less direct path to the answer.

Has anyone else noticed something similar?