The phrase "a kind of benchmark" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a standard or point of reference against which things can be compared or assessed.
Example: "The new software serves as a kind of benchmark for evaluating the performance of similar applications in the market."
Alternatives: "a type of standard" or "a form of reference point".
As a kind of benchmark of mainstreamness, Black Cat recently sponsored its first Nascar race.
Then, when banks borrow from each other, they use the Fed interest rate as a kind of benchmark.
Simple models frequently adopted in the DAE literature were used to provide a kind of benchmark for the initialization problem.
The problems are designed to represent various inspection and patrolling tasks and can form a kind of benchmark set for multi-goal path planning algorithms.
Either she would think that I had been with another woman or, if she did believe my story, it would strike her as so weird as to be a kind of benchmark in our married life.
This article explores the latter perspective, and suggests a unified approach to the X-ray heating in all single nonmagnetic hot stars, as a kind of benchmark for observational testing.
"It's so hard to identify an honest mortgage originator -- and every state is different when it comes to licensing requirements -- that we realized there was a need for some kind of benchmark by which lenders could be identified".
It's long been understood that economic measures of success like gross domestic product (GDP) give a sense of a country's well-being, but that kind of benchmark doesn't provide a complete picture, says Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter '69.
Well, the subtitle is here: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, but it's not accidental that he is playing off of this title of a ballet of Igor Stravinsky, because the ballet of Stravinsky was a kind of watershed, a touchstone, the benchmark from which Modernism can be calculated and against which it can be measured.
