Med school students are "pimped" regularly. Pimping is when a person lower in the hierarchy is asked a question by a person higher up.
Med school students are pimped by everyone.
Residents are pimped by residents who are further along and my "attending" physicians.

I've always thought of it as asking harder and harder questions until the junior person has to say "I don't know," as must happen eventually due to the seniority and experience of the questioner, setting up the victim to fail no matter how much they might be above their level of training. "See? I know more than you do, and don't you forget it. And I'm going to make you admit it in public, too." [and grovel in it...] It's really a form of bullying.

I always considered it revealed a character flaw in the questioner.

In medical school there was a professor who pimped us regularly as a teaching tool, but without any sense of sarcasm, cruelty, or abuse. He was actually very tongue in cheek about it. He would occasionally throw out a "gold star" question, which promised to be a more difficult or esoteric question and if you answered it correctly you were rewarded with a brief moment of glory, and if you could answer three gold star questions in a row you got to go home and take the rest of the day off. Needless to say, if you ever got two gold star questions correct, the third one was going to be a real doozy. Thus, no one ever got to take the rest of the day off. But it was all in good fun.