Claude Sonnet 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Compute final course grades with late penalties, a dropped homework and excused items

AClaude Sonnet 5.5default · thinking on · Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p) · cloud · 2026-10-20 · by @bobsiopener

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first tryCompare

Estimated cost: $0.06
Wall time: 13s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Compute final course grades from a gradebook Inputs: `syllabus.json` (category weights, letter cut-offs, late rule) and `gradebook.json` (each student's scores per assignment: points earned, points possible, days late, or "EX" for excused). Rules: - Excused ("EX") items are left out of both earned and possible points. - Late homework loses 10% of its earned points per day late, up to 3 days (so at most 30%). Only homework has a late penalty. - Drop each student's single lowest homework, by percentage of possible points after the late penalty (on a tie, drop the earlier one). Excused items can't be dropped. - Category percentage = sum of earned points / sum of possible points x 100, using the remaining items. - Final percentage = sum of category percentage x category weight, rounded half-up to 2 decimal places. - Letter grade comes from the rounded final percentage and the cut-offs in syllabus.json (a cut-off is a minimum, inclusive). Write `out/grades.json`: `{"<student_id>": {"homework_pct": <number>, "quiz_pct": <number>, "exam_pct": <number>, "final_pct": <number>, "letter": "<A-F>"}, ...}`. Category percentages are checked to within 0.01. ## How this run works - Work on your own: nobody will answer questions in this task, and writing to `ask/` counts against the run. - Write only under `out/`. Create `out/` if it is missing. Inputs are synthetic; don't fetch anything from the network. - Scoring is partial credit: each listed check is pass/fail, and the score is the share passed. Numbers are compared to within 0.005 unless the task says otherwise.

Compute category percentages, weighted final percentages and letter grades for 10-14 students. The rules cover a capped per-day late penalty, dropping the lowest homework by percentage, and excused items that count toward neither earned nor possible points. Finals within 0.3 points of a letter cut-off or near a rounding tie are redrawn. Original benchmark task written for usecaserank.com (not based on a specific public post). Headless, offline run on a reproducible fixture. Each run's notes say how its cost was measured (estimates are marked).

Success criteria: homework_with_late_and_drop quiz_excused_excluded exam_pct final_pct letters late_penalty_capped

Setup notes: Batch 16 case r06-gradebook-final-grades (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 911432353). Autonomous case: no stand-in user and no step-ins expected; any file the solver wrote to ask/ is counted as a measured intervention (0) and blocks a pass. Prompt = TASK.md verbatim. Hidden key kept outside the solver's work dir. Scored with the case's scorer (python3 score.py WORKDIR KEYDIR, absolute paths); pass = every check true and no ask/ files. Tools: Read/Write/Edit/Glob/Grep/Bash, web disabled. Single run, no retries. 1-min load average at scoring 0.16 (8 cores). Claude Code's own reported cost for claude-sonnet-5.5: $0.058526. Score: 6/6. Cost is an ESTIMATE: measured tokens x pricing.json list price (Claude Pro subscription, nothing billed); input_tokens include cache reads and writes. Single run.

Estimated cost List-price estimate; not actually billed.

Metrics

Estimated cost: $0.06
Wall time: 13s
Human step-ins: 0
Turns: 4

Model usage
Model	Input tok	Output tok	Cost
AClaude Sonnet 5.5anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on	79,586	1,498	$0.06

Reproduce this run

Use the use case prompt on the use case page.
Same setup: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5, effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) via Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p), cloud.
It counts as a success only if it meets every success criterion: homework_with_late_and_drop quiz_excused_excluded exam_pct final_pct letters late_penalty_capped
Log model, tokens, wall time, human step-ins and the evidence log, then submit it as a reproduction. A different model? Submit a head-to-head rerun.

How runs are scored: Methodology.

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Automated checks

Trust 80% comes from these checks (how Trust % works).

Run date is not in the future : passed
Model is in the dated pricing table : passed
Cost recomputed from tokens matches : passed
Cached tokens are consistent : passed
Output throughput is plausible : passed
Autonomy matches step-ins : passed
Step-ins do not exceed turns : passed
Retries agree with first-try result : passed
Evidence log SHA-256 matches : passed
Evidence log is substantial : passed

Evidence log

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  "result": "I wrote `out/grades.json` with grades for all 11 students. I haven't checked it against any reference values, so the figures come only from the rules as I applied them.\n\nA few places where I had to make a call:\n- **Lateness over 3 days:** five homework items were more than 3 days late. The syllabus says \"max 3 days\", so I capped their penalty at 30%.\n- **Excused items:** these are removed before anything else, so they can't be dropped.\n- **Dropping the lowest homework:** I dropped one item per student, by percentage after the late penalty and the earlier one on a tie.\n- **Letter grades:** each letter comes from the rounded final percentage, with the cut-offs treated as inclusive minimums.\n\nThe final percentage is rounded half-up to 2 decimals. Category percentages are stored to 4 decimals.",
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 }
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