I don't think you're being clear about whether the questions were novel. If you discover your question was uncreative, surely e.g. some details, wording, facts, names, or numbers inside the question can be changed to defeat a model that is answering it from memory?

If you're saying that it is not possible to change the details enough to avoid the model being able to answer that type of question, I think you are admitting that the model has learned a generalized ability to answer questions of that class, and is not actually using its memory to answer at all.

I don't care about whether it learned that generalized ability from seeing examples of the question and answer, which it then deduced an algorithm for and generalized -- that's how most people learn most things.