She’s obviously never met folks like that college classmate.
He never needed help and absorbed so much he along with yours truly were often the ones to provide help to other classmates in our class who struggled to finish the weekly reading loads or with some of the concepts/content covered within. In fact, I was and to some extent, still am jealous of his ability to be machine like in being able to retain everything he reads despite his rapid reading pace and be equally effective in connecting different readings and analyzing them.
It also didn’t hurt him in his PhD program or landing a tenure-track assistant Prof job just 4 years after starting his PhD. A remarkably fast time and feat considering the average time to completion in his field is at least twice as long and most from what I’ve seen/heard would need to pursue at least one post-doc before landing a tenure-track assistant Prof position at a respectable university somewhere in the NW no less.