arXiv:2609.38850v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reasoning models are trained to produce correct answers, yet selective deployment requires ranking which answers to accept or defer, and outcome-reward training does not directly optimize the post-rationale distribution used for that decision. We identify two mismatches: expected correctness is mode-seeking rather than distribution-eliciting, and scoring an average across rationales rewards disagreement unavailable to a single-rationale decision. We introduce Post-Rationale Distribution Optimization (PRDO), which applies a proper score to the answer distribution after each sampled rationale, without target rationales or separate confidence labels. Across four 0.6--3.8-billion-parameter models on MMLU-Pro, PRDO improves Brier score, error ranking and secondary accuracy relative to budget-matched, temperature-scaled GRPO. At 20\% realized error, oracle coverage rises by \npj{Q3a_vs_grpo.qwen3-0.6b.mp.oracle_cov@0.2.ppabs}--\npj{Q3a_vs_grpo.phi-4-mini.mp.oracle_cov@0.2.ppabs} percentage points, and ranking gains transfer to unseen tasks. Matched controls identify proper, per-rationale scoring as the active design choices, while verification tasks show the boundary: better selective ranking can coexist with lower full-coverage accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/ZimmyGao/openjev-rlcd