recognizing pre-existing custom fields

I’ve been using a custom field manually now for quite some time, but I’ve been looking for a way to make it easier for my writers to enter a value. In this case it’s the score for a review.

I was successful at creating the field group and field, using the same name as the existing field, but the drop down doesn’t recognize and auto-select the value from the dropdown on those posts that already have that custom field stored.

Any help is appreciated.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-fields/