Benchmark Almanac

RACE-M

PaLM 2-L 77% leads since May 2023 Dropped

Models read passages from English exams for Chinese middle school students and answer multiple-choice questions. Scored by accuracy.

This is the middle school subset of RACE, alongside the harder high school subset RACE-H.

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)
Made by Carnegie Mellon University Released Apr 2017 Reading comprehension All tasks public Last in a launch post Dec 2024 , dropped before it saturated Last model added Dec 2024
Level
School Students, from grade school to high school
Scored
Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
Answers
Multiple choice
3
Models scored in lab cards
2
Launch posts list it, from 2 labs
1
System card reports it, from 1 lab

PaLM 2-L leads with 77% among models released by Dec 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 Dec 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 PaLM 2-L 77%
  2. 2 DeepSeek LLM 67B 70.9%
  3. 3 DeepSeek-V3 67.1%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 PaLM 2-L 77% May 2023 Model card
2 DeepSeek LLM 67B 70.9% Jan 2024 Model card
3 DeepSeek-V3 67.1% Dec 2024 Model card

Number one over time

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

Other labs
Lab claims Not tested since Dec 2024
PaLM 2-L 77%

Scores over time

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
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) PaLM 2-L 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) PaLM 2-L

No launch post has listed it since Dec 2024

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
DeepSeek
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
26 Dec 2024 DeepSeek-V3 67.1 RACE-Middle (Acc.)
10 May 2023 PaLM 2-L 77 RACE-M, 1-shot

One system card reports it

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
5 Jan 2024 DeepSeek LLM 67B technical report 70.9 RACE-Middle, DeepSeek 67B Chat (Table 6) Capabilities

More in Knowledge

All 109 in Knowledge
  • MMLU-Pro In use Harder 10-option version of MMLU with reasoning-focused questions across 14 subjects. Intern-S2-397B 89.8%
  • SuperGPQA In use 26,529 graduate-level multiple-choice questions across 285 disciplines. Accuracy. Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) 73.9%
  • 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%
  • 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%
  • BIG-Bench Extra Hard In use Models solve harder replacements for each of the 23 BIG-Bench Hard tasks, 4,520 examples in total. The score is a harmonic mean of task accuracies. Gemma 4 31B IT 74.4%
  • 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%