I’m so glad I stumbled on this post today. I have twins and I think my girls both made the cutoff. We live in FL. The cutoff was 219 last year and they received 225 and 222. We knew about Benacquisto for FL schools and are looking at both UCF and UF as well as GA Tech and some other T20 schools. My daughters think they both want to study CS. What should we do about ranking the schools on the application? To receive Benacquisto, the FL state school you want has to be listed as #1 but that isn’t their #1 school out of their list. I don’t think their #1 schools offer much for NM finalists though.
Someone earlier asked about CS at UCF. UCF has an excellent program and to be honest, probably better than UF even though UF is the flagship school in the state. In particular, UCF has an amazing Competitive Programming team that has been the top performing US school for the past few years and #1 of North American schools in 2018 in the major international competition (ACM ICPC). They beat all schools like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc… They also have a great Cyber Defense team and were #1 nationally a few years ago.