I disagree with this. If you believe that one thing "3 tier" means is that the client doesn't interact directly with a database, as the old fat-client -> database model did, then "MVC" was one pattern to accomplish that. So, to me, there is some relationship. Enough of one to have a interview discussion about it.

I do agree that they aren't the same thing, but they are pretty clearly related to me.

The interview question was “How does this architecture relate to the model-view-controller pattern?”