alt Hacker NewsI think there is ample evidence IQ correlates with lots of things like job success, performance in mental work, income etc to the point the military and many organizations require an IQ test for sensitive tasks. To dismiss it as curriculum memorization, which I think is what you are hinting at, is demonstrably incorrect.
Outside of science it seems to be that people measure intelligence as "what I feel I have" and nothing else.
Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.