While SFT distillation meaningfully improves overall performance over the base model, the gap between the two approaches is most apparent when combined with test-time compute. On in-distribution tasks, SFT benefits substantially from parallel sampling (69.1 → 75.3), yet on out-of-distribution tasks the gains are negligible (59.4 → 59.6). This suggests that distillation teaches the model to imitate task-specific expert behavior, which scales well within the training distribution but fails to generalize beyond it. In contrast, KARL benefits from test-time compute both in- and out-of-distribution, indicating that RL develops more general search capabilities rather than task-specific heuristic