arXiv:2611.13541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-science and ML-engineering agents are evaluated on benchmarks such as MLE-bench, ALE-Bench, SWE-fficiency and AlgoTune, whose tasks yield a quantity (a Kaggle metric, contest score or speedup). When one stops separating the best models, the usual remedy is a harder version. Re-scoring released runs of eight benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench for breadth, we find much of this saturation lies in the measurement, not the tasks. Most agent benchmarks reduce a run to one pass/fail bit, which fails in two ways. It is too coarse: neighbouring top-ten agents on SWE-bench Verified differ by less than its tests' errors, and correcting them reorders neighbours no more than deleting a random sixth of each agent's passes. It is capped at the reference: ALE-Bench's top ten, separated by contest score, tie when graded against the median human, although nearly half the runs beat that human. On fixed tasks, a higher bar only moves the problem; graded credit fixes it. We derive a clipped log-ratio score with dated anchors and cost as a separate axis. In a Terminal-Bench re-run, pass/fail-tied models differ over tenfold on the quantity the tests discard.