Does the Adversity Score Actually Help Students or Hurt Students?

Last week, the College Board, the company that is in charge of administering the SAT, PSAT, AP Tests, and SAT Subject Tests, announced that they are rolling out the "Environmental Context Dashboard."  This Environmental Context Dashboard will assign a score to a student based on many factors, such as the student's neighborhood environment, high school environment, and family environment.

The only problem with this new statistic is: will the Environmental Context Dashboard score hurt more or help more students?  By assigning a score to a student's hardships or environmental context, the College Board is essentially reducing a student's life down to a number.  By doing so, this gets rid of a student's uniqueness as an applicant.  This is dangerous because some students may not face much "traditional" adversity, such as high crime rates or low family income, however, they may face much more "unique" adversity, such as (bear with me) sexual abuse perpetrated by the parent or parental substance abuse.  These two unique adversities are unable to be thrown into an algorithm to calculate one's adversity.  The most dangerous part of the Environmental Context Dashboard is that students are unable to see their own score.  This creates a lack of transparency for students who may want to dispute their "adversity."  Obviously, the Environmental Context Dashboard will not cause that much of an issue if the universities do not consider it as a determining factor of a student's admittance.

This is a dangerous move towards an unfair path.  The entire point of the SAT is to provide a standardized score for universities to understand an applicant's ability or academic accomplishments.  The SAT should not provide any additional information regarding a student's life, read hardships.  A student's hardships are a student's own and should not be translated into an obscure number.