A 328 is comfortably competitive almost everywhere. Whether it is competitive at your specific programme depends on which half of it is doing the work.
You are past the threshold where a GRE score gets an application filtered out. From a 328 the leverage moves to fit — which programmes, in which field, reading which half of this number.
Yes. A 328 is above the average admitted score in all 8 fields ETS reports, and a balanced split puts you around the 93th percentile on Verbal and the 63th on Quant.
Whatever you are applying to, the field average is below you. The top of the table is Physical Sciences at 314; a 328 clears it with room.
Read them as a temperature check. They place your score inside a discipline; they say nothing about a particular department's expectations, which vary far more than the field mean suggests.
Adding your two section scores together is something you do, not something ETS does. There is no official meaning attached to 328 as a single figure, which is why two people holding it can be in very different positions.
The consequence is dramatic at this total. Across the realistic ways of reaching a 328, the published section percentiles run from the 45th all the way to the 99th. Same number on the score report; completely different applications.
Balanced, a 328 is 164 Verbal and 164 Quant — the 93th and 63th percentile. Notice they are not close. Quant is compressed at the top because so many test takers do well on it, so an identical scaled score is worth far less in percentile terms there.
Probably not. A 328 is above every published field average, and ETS shows programmes your full score history under ScoreSelect unless you choose otherwise. Retaking to move a number that is already doing its job is a poor trade.
There is a single scenario worth the trouble — your field reads one section closely and that section is behind. Otherwise the score is finished.
Five minutes of due diligence: put each half of your 328 through the GRE percentile calculator and check the weaker one against your discipline's average rather than against the other section.
Check your section percentilesLook up the average Verbal and Quant for your specific field rather than the total. A 328 is competitive on paper; the section your programme reads is what makes it competitive in practice.
The reported engineering average is 313, so a 328 is above it — but those programmes read Quant closely, so check that half against the 163 field average.
Split, usually. A department in a quantitative field is reading one number, and across the ways of building a 328 that number ranges from the 45th to the 99th percentile.
There isn't one for the total — ETS percentiles each section and never the sum. Built as 164 Verbal and 164 Quant, the published figures are the 93th and 63th.
Comfortably. Every graduate field ETS publishes an average for reports a total below 328.