Benchmark Almanac

RACE-H

Claude 3 Opus 92.9% leads since March 2024
Dropped

Models answer multiple-choice reading questions from English exams for Chinese high school students. The test split has 3,498 questions, scored by accuracy.

Released
April 2017
Kind
Reading comprehension
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
December 2024, dropped after it saturated
Last model added
December 2024

In the authors’ words

We present RACE, a new dataset for benchmark evaluation of methods in the reading comprehension task. Collected from the English exams for middle and high school Chinese students in the age range between 12 to 18, RACE consists of near 28,000 passages and near 100,000 questions generated by human experts (English instructors), and covers a variety of topics which are carefully designed for evaluating the students' ability in understanding and reasoning. In particular, the proportion of questions that requires reasoning is much larger in RACE than that in other benchmark datasets for reading comprehension, and there is a significant gap between the performance of the state-of-the-art models (43%) and the ceiling human performance (95%). We hope this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in machine comprehension. The dataset is freely available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~glai1/data/race/ and the code is available at https://github.com/qizhex/RACE_AR_baselines.

Abstract of RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations (arXiv:1704.04683, CC0)
7
Models scored in lab cards
4
Launch posts list it, from 3 labs
5
System cards report it, from 2 labs

Claude 3 Opus leads with 92.9% among models released by December 2024

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 December 2024, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:

  1. 1 Claude 3 Opus 92.9%
  2. 2 Claude 3 Sonnet 88.8%
  3. 3 Claude 2 88.3%
  4. 4 Claude 3 Haiku 87%
  5. 5 PaLM 2-L 62.3%
  6. 6 DeepSeek LLM 67B 56%
  7. 7 DeepSeek-V3 51.3%

Source: Labs’ model cards

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Claude 3 Opus 92.9% Mar 2024 Lab model card
2 Claude 3 Sonnet 88.8% Mar 2024 Lab model card
3 Claude 2 88.3% Jul 2023 Lab model card
4 Claude 3 Haiku 87% Mar 2024 Lab model card
5 PaLM 2-L 62.3% May 2023 Lab model card
6 DeepSeek LLM 67B 56% Jan 2024 Lab model card
7 DeepSeek-V3 51.3% Dec 2024 Lab model card

3 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 Anthropic
Lab claims Passed 85% in Jul 2023, by Claude 2

Source: Labs’ model cards

Anthropic’s own number for Claude 2 passed 85% in July 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%) Claude 3 Opus Claude 2 PaLM 2-L 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) Claude 3 Opus 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
Anthropic
DeepSeek
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
Dec 26, 2024 DeepSeek-V3 51.3 RACE-High (Acc.)
Mar 4, 2024 Claude 3 Opus 92.9 RACE-H (5-shot)
Jul 11, 2023 Claude 2 88.3 RACE-H (5-shot)
May 10, 2023 PaLM 2-L 62.3 RACE-H, 1-shot

5 system cards report it, from 2 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
Mar 4, 2024 Claude 3 Sonnet model card 88.8 RACE-H, 5-shot (Table 1) Capabilities
Mar 4, 2024 Claude 3 Opus model card 92.9 RACE-H, 5-shot (Table 1) Capabilities
Mar 4, 2024 Claude 3 Haiku model card 87 RACE-H, 5-shot (Table 1) Capabilities
Jan 5, 2024 DeepSeek LLM 67B technical report 56 RACE-High, DeepSeek 67B Chat (Table 6) Capabilities
Jul 11, 2023 Claude 2 model card 88.3 RACE-H (5-shot) (4.3) Capabilities

More in Knowledge

All 121 in Knowledge
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  • WideSearch In use 200 bilingual broad info-seeking tasks: agent collects many atomic facts into a table. Scored by success rate and row/item F1. Tencent Hy4 preview 83.9%
  • BBEH micro average In use Models solve harder replacements for each of the 23 BIG-Bench Hard tasks, 4,520 examples in total. The score is the share of all examples answered correctly. Gemma 4 31B IT 74.4%
  • KMMLU-Pro In use Models answer multiple-choice questions taken from Korean National Professional Licensure exams. It tests professional knowledge used in Korean industry. Solar Pro 4 79.2%
  • HLE-Verified In use Verified and revised version of Humanity's Last Exam (1,811 items) with uncertain items removed. Seed2.0 Pro 73.6%