How the FAFSA And ACT Can Hurt Your Application

Seriously though, my daughter did list the schools on her FAFSA alphabetically (in order: Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Smith, Wellesley, and Yale), and her RD schools could have reasonably concluded she had been accepted EA to one of HYPM (as Smith and Wellesley are RD schools, and there are no obvious backups in the list). However this conclusion may well have been incorrect, because it is possible to submit the FAFSA to more than one set of schools, and it could have been that she was accepted to none, and had submitted a separate list with her backups.

I sincerely hope colleges are smart enough to realize this and are not rejecting applicants based on potentially false conclusions.