I sometimes had a very small piece of paper scribbled with stuff I couldn't remember while learning but turns out this way I knew what I had written down there and didn't need it afterall :D
One time I accidentally forgot about that tiny paper though and my teacher actually found it on some stairs and recognized my handwriting.
I used to do something similar, but writing it on my shoe (in pencil) so I wouldn’t lose the paper.
Mostly did it in my Japanese class in college because I didn’t have time to memorize vocab properly, but I never wrote the translations so I knew the info, it was basically a memory jog.
Our history teacher would give anyone who submitted a good cheatsheet (meaning good info, small form factor) for the test beforehand an automatic pass (but no higher than a passing grade), though you can’t take the test for a higher grade.
Yea, the thought was that if you actually went the distance to create a good handwritten sheet, you have probably learned enough for at least a passing grade, so you can take that out instead of getting caught and failing.
The best cheating I ever saw in highschool/university was:
written on the brim of a hat sitting on the table. Guy would "fiddle" with it while "thinking hard".
guy peeled off a water bottle label, wrote on it, and stuck it back. You could read the notes through the bottle, but they were faint enough it wasn't too obvious waking by.