Benchmark Almanac

ARC-Easy

DeepSeek-V3 98.9% leads since December 2024
Dropped

Models answer grade-school science multiple-choice questions from the ARC Easy Set, which has 5,197 questions. Scoring is accuracy.

ARC-Challenge is the harder companion split, made of questions that retrieval and co-occurrence baselines failed.

Released
March 2018
Kind
Exam questions
Level
School
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Multiple choice
Tasks
All public
Strongest model tested
DeepSeek-V3 #154 on the capability index
Last in a launch post
June 2025, dropped after it saturated
Last model added
June 2025

In the authors’ words

We present a new question set, text corpus, and baselines assembled to encourage AI research in advanced question answering. Together, these constitute the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC), which requires far more powerful knowledge and reasoning than previous challenges such as SQuAD or SNLI. The ARC question set is partitioned into a Challenge Set and an Easy Set, where the Challenge Set contains only questions answered incorrectly by both a retrieval-based algorithm and a word co-occurence algorithm. The dataset contains only natural, grade-school science questions (authored for human tests), and is the largest public-domain set of this kind (7,787 questions). We test several baselines on the Challenge Set, including leading neural models from the SQuAD and SNLI tasks, and find that none are able to significantly outperform a random baseline, reflecting the difficult nature of this task. We are also releasing the ARC Corpus, a corpus of 14M science sentences relevant to the task, and implementations of the three neural baseline models tested. Can your model perform better? We pose ARC as a challenge to the community.

Abstract of Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (arXiv:1803.05457, CC0)
23
Models scored in lab cards
11
Launch posts list it, from 4 labs
20
System cards report it, from 5 labs

DeepSeek-V3 leads with 98.9% among models released by June 2025

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

The newest model with a score here came out in June 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:

  1. 1 DeepSeek-V3 98.9%
  2. 2 DeepSeek-V2 (MoE-236B, May 2024) 98.1%
  3. 3 phi-3-medium 14B 97.8%
  4. 4 phi-3-small 7.4B 97%
  5. 5 phi-3-mini 3.8B 94.6%
  6. 6 PaLM 2-L 89.7%
  7. 7 Gemma 3 27B 89%
  8. 8 Gemma 2 27B 88.6%
  9. 9 Gemma 3 12B 88.3%
  10. 10 Gemma 2 9B 88%
  11. 11 Mixtral 8x7B 83.1%
  12. 12 Gemma 3 4B 82.4%
  13. 13 DeepSeek LLM 67B 81.6%
  14. 14 Gemma 3n E4B 81.6%
  15. 15 Gemma 7B 81.5%
  16. 16 Llama 2-70B 80.2%
  17. 17 Mistral 7B v0.1 80%
  18. 18 Llama 2-34B 79.4%
  19. 19 Llama 2-13B 77.3%
  20. 20 Llama 2-7B 75.2%
  21. 21 BitNet b1.58 2B4T 74.8%
  22. 22 Gemma 2B 73.2%
  23. 23 Gemma 3 1B 73%

Source: Labs’ model cards

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 DeepSeek-V3 98.9% Dec 2024 Lab model card
2 DeepSeek-V2 (MoE-236B, May 2024) 98.1% May 2024 Lab model card
3 phi-3-medium 14B 97.8% Apr 2024 Lab model card
4 phi-3-small 7.4B 97% Aug 2024 Lab model card
5 phi-3-mini 3.8B 94.6% Aug 2024 Lab model card
6 PaLM 2-L 89.7% May 2023 Lab model card
7 Gemma 3 27B 89% Mar 2025 Lab model card
8 Gemma 2 27B 88.6% Jun 2024 Lab model card
9 Gemma 3 12B 88.3% Mar 2025 Lab model card
10 Gemma 2 9B 88% Jul 2024 Lab model card
11 Mixtral 8x7B 83.1% Dec 2023 Lab model card
12 Gemma 3 4B 82.4% Mar 2025 Lab model card
13 DeepSeek LLM 67B 81.6% Jan 2024 Lab model card
14 Gemma 3n E4B 81.6% Jun 2025 Lab model card
15 Gemma 7B 81.5% Feb 2024 Lab model card
16 Llama 2-70B 80.2% Jul 2023 Lab model card
17 Mistral 7B v0.1 80% Sep 2023 Lab model card
18 Llama 2-34B 79.4% Jul 2023 Lab model card
19 Llama 2-13B 77.3% Jul 2023 Lab model card
20 Llama 2-7B 75.2% Jul 2023 Lab model card
21 BitNet b1.58 2B4T 74.8% Apr 2025 Lab model card
22 Gemma 2B 73.2% Mar 2024 Lab model card
23 Gemma 3 1B 73% Mar 2025 Lab model card

4 models have held number one in labs’ own numbers since 2023

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

Other labs Microsoft DeepSeek
Lab claims Passed 85% in May 2023, by PaLM 2-L
DeepSeek-V3 98.9%

Source: Labs’ model cards

Its lab’s own number for PaLM 2-L passed 85% in May 2023

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) DeepSeek-V3 DeepSeek-V2 (MoE-236B, May 2024) PaLM 2-L 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) DeepSeek-V3 PaLM 2-L

Source: Labs’ model cards

Labs dropped it from launch posts once the best score passed 85%

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

Google DeepMind
Mistral AI
Microsoft
DeepSeek
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
Jun 26, 2025 Gemma 3n E4B 81.6 ARC-e 0-shot (PT)
Apr 15, 2025 BitNet b1.58 2B4T 74.8 ARC-Easy
Mar 12, 2025 Gemma 3 27B 89 ARC-e 0-shot (PT)
Dec 26, 2024 DeepSeek-V3 98.9 ARC-Easy (Acc.)
Jun 27, 2024 Gemma 2 27B 88.6 ARC-e (0-shot)
Apr 22, 2024 phi-3-medium 14B 97.8 Arc-E (10-Shot)
Feb 21, 2024 Gemma 7B 81.5 ARC-e
Dec 12, 2023 Phi-2 ARC easy (in Commonsense Reasoning average only)
Dec 11, 2023 Mixtral 8x7B 83.1 Arc-e [detailed table]
Sep 27, 2023 Mistral 7B v0.1 80 Arc-e
May 10, 2023 PaLM 2-L 89.7 ARC-E, 1-shot

20 system cards report it, from 5 labs

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
Apr 16, 2025 BitNet b1.58 2B4T technical report 74.8 ARC-Easy (0-shot; Acc,norm) (Table 1, Table 3) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 4B technical report 82.4 ARC-E, PT, 0-shot (Table 9) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 27B technical report 89 ARC-E, PT, 0-shot (Table 9) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 1B technical report 73 ARC-E, PT, 0-shot (Table 9) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 12B technical report 88.3 ARC-E, PT, 0-shot (Table 9) Capabilities
Aug 30, 2024 phi-3-small 7.4B technical report 97 Arc-E (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) Capabilities
Aug 30, 2024 phi-3-mini 3.8B technical report 94.6 Arc-E (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) Capabilities
Aug 30, 2024 phi-3-medium 14B technical report 97.7 Arc-E (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) Capabilities
Jul 31, 2024 Gemma 2 9B technical report 88 ARC-e, PT, 0-shot (Table 13) Capabilities
Jul 31, 2024 Gemma 2 27B technical report 88.6 ARC-e, PT, 0-shot (Table 13) Capabilities
May 7, 2024 DeepSeek-V2 (MoE-236B, May 2024) technical report 98.1 ARC-Easy 25-shot, DeepSeek-V2 Chat (RL) (Table 3) Capabilities
Mar 13, 2024 Gemma 7B technical report 81.5 ARC-e, PT (Table 6) Capabilities
Mar 13, 2024 Gemma 2B technical report 73.2 ARC-e, PT (Table 6) Capabilities
Jan 8, 2024 Mixtral 8x7B technical report 83.1 Arc-e, 0-shot (Table 2) Capabilities
Jan 5, 2024 DeepSeek LLM 67B technical report 81.6 ARC-Easy, DeepSeek 67B Chat (Table 6) Capabilities
Oct 10, 2023 Mistral 7B v0.1 technical report 80 Arc-e, 0-shot (Table 2) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-7B technical report 75.2 ARC-e, 0-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-70B technical report 80.2 ARC-e, 0-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-34B technical report 79.4 ARC-e, 0-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-13B technical report 77.3 ARC-e, 0-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities

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