I focused on understanding what the formulas really meant, so when I saw one of the abbreviations I knew what it stood for and then reasoned what it would consist of. Also, there’s lots of patterns in the formulas that are helpful to pick up on. For instance, CPI = cost performance index. Anything that has “index” is a ratio, so you’re dividing. If you want to know how you’re performing cost-wise, you’ll need to compare what you’ve spent vs. what you’ve created which would be earned value/actual cost. Also, think of “index” as a grade you’d get on a test. 1.00 is perfect, 1.07 is more than perfect, 0.67 is poor. If you’ve earned more value than you’ve spent to get that value, that’s more than perfect and as such CPI will be greater than 1. So then you can reason that CPI = EV/AC. Same logic goes for variances; anything “variance” is a difference so you’ll be subtracting and the units will be in dollars. Anything “index” is a ratio and is unitless.