A 339 is within touching distance of a perfect 340, and there are only a handful of ways to even assemble it. The score has stopped being a variable in your application.
A 339 is close enough to a perfect 340 that the usual advice about Verbal-Quant balance stops applying — you cannot be meaningfully unbalanced at this total, because both sections have to be near their ceilings.
As good as the GRE realistically gets. A 339 clears every published field average, so the score is not what any committee will discuss.
The split conversation quietly ends up here. To total 339 you need both halves close to 170, so the usual question of which section is carrying the score has no room to be interesting.
That constraint is also why the percentile stops moving. Verbal tops out at the 99th and Quant at the 91st, so the last few scaled points buy almost nothing in rank terms even though they are by far the hardest to earn.
No discipline in the ETS tables averages as high as a 339. Physical Sciences comes closest at 314, and it is still well short.
Treat those averages as orientation, not thresholds. They are means across everyone who reported a score in that discipline, which mixes together programmes with very different expectations.
Here is the thing most pages about a 339 get wrong: it is not one score. ETS reports Verbal and Quant separately, publishes a percentile for each, and publishes nothing at all for the sum. A committee reads the two halves.
Near the ceiling the distinction softens — every route to a 339 puts both sections between about the 86th and 99th percentile.
Split evenly, a 339 is 169/170, which ETS puts at the 99th percentile for Verbal and the 91th for Quant. That gap is not an error; the Quant distribution is simply far more crowded at the high end.
There is little here worth chasing. The score clears every field average, and the realistic upside is a few points nobody reading your file would weigh differently.
The one exception is a lopsided split. If the section your field actually reads sits well below its average, targeted work on that half can be worth it — the whole test does not need repeating.
Verify the shape before you stop thinking about the test. The GRE percentile calculator turns your two scaled scores into the two percentiles a committee will see.
Check your section percentilesSend it and forget it. A score this high cannot be improved in any way a committee would notice.
Rarely worth it. The total already clears every field average, and a few more points would not change how a committee reads the file.
Above the 313 engineering average, yes. The number that matters more there is your Quant score on its own, against 163.
For most programmes the split matters more. Departments read the section relevant to their field, and at a 339 the published section figures span the 86th to the 99th percentile depending on distribution.
ETS publishes no combined percentile. What it does publish, for an even 169/170 split, is the 99th percentile on Verbal and the 91th on Quant.