As others have said, run the NPC’s and you should know if you’re in the ballpark. Occasionally they are not accurate, but I think that most schools that meet 100% of need, they are pretty good.The ones we had issues with were not full-need met schools. And we didn’t do any ED, so can’t speak from experience.
As a real example of how people are burnt, head over to the Boston College forum. Here’s a post from a thread there that gives a link to a great article. I think that the BC NPC is correct, so that’s not so much the issue, rather, that each schools idea of need is very different and they have their own calculations, as others have said.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19248028/#Comment_19248028