Although there are mutations that might affect the forgetting rate, at the very lowest biological level, i.e. the synaptic level, the rate of forgetting is indeed basically the same; independent of how smart you are. However, the same thing that makes people learn faster, helps them forget slower. The key to learning and slow forgetting is representation (i.e. the way knowledge is formulated). If you learn with SuperMemo, you will know that items can range from being very difficult to being very easy. The difficult ones are forgotten much faster and require shorter intervals between repetitions. The key to making items easy, is to formulate them well. Moreover, good students will show better performance on the exactly same material. This is because the ultimate test on the formulation of knowledge is not in how it is structured in your learning material, but in the way it is stored in your mind. With massive learning effort, you will gradually improve the way you absorb and represent knowledge in your mind. The fastest student is the one who can instinctively visualize and store knowledge in his mind using minimum-information maximum-connectivity imagery