This week the College Board, operators of the SAT college admissions tests, made a very big announcement: in addition to its traditional verbal and mathematic skills measurement scores, it will be adding a new score, which it is calling an “adversity score.”

In a nutshell, the purpose of the adversity score is to help college admissions officers “contextualize” the other two scores. Primarily based on area demographic data (crime rates, poverty rates, etc.) and school-specific data (number of AP courses offered, etc.) this new assessment will generate a score from 1 to 100, with 100 indicating that the student has experienced the highest level of adversity.

Public reaction so far has been mixed. Some see it as an honest effort to help combat college admission disparities. Other see it is a desperate business move by the College Board, which is facing an accelerating trend towards college adopting test-optional admission policies (over 1,000 colleges nationwide are currently test-optional).

I’m willing to stipulate that the College Board had its heart in the right place in developing this new score, but I am underwhelmed by its design and execution.

My first concern is that the College Board is keeping the design methodology of the score secret. I find that odd since the new score seems to rely on benign and objective Census and school data. However, at least a few published articles seemed to suggest that the College Board has included “proprietary data” as well. Let the conspiracy theories begin!

Secondly, the score is being kept secret from students for no good reason that I can see. All this policy does is add to adolescent and parental angst and uncertainty, while creating lots of new opportunities for high-priced advisors to suggest ways to game the score to advantage. And the recent college admissions scandal shows just how far some parents are willing to go to improve the scores of their children.

My third concern is that this new score is assigned to each individual student, when it is in reality a score of the school and its surrounding area. If the College Board had created a school scoring data product (one that could be easily linked to any student’s application) and sold it as a freestanding product, there would likely be no controversy around it. 

Perhaps most fundamentally though, the new score doesn’t work to strengthen or improve the original two scores. That’s because what it is measuring and how it measures is completely at odds with the original two scores. The new score is potentially useful, but it’s a bolt-on. Moreover, the way this score was positioned and launched opens it up to all the scrutiny and criticism the original scores have attracted, and that can’t be what the College Board wants. Already, Twitter is ablaze with people citing specific circumstances where the score would be inaccurate or yield unintended outcomes.

Scores and ratings can be extremely powerful. But the more powerful they become, the more carefully you need to tread in updating, modifying or extending them. The College Board hasn’t just created a new Adversity Score for students. It’s also likely to have a caused a lot of new adversity for itself.