A 340 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.
Almost nobody reading your application will have seen many scores like this. What that buys you is not admission; it is the removal of the GRE from every conversation about your file.
Yes, decisively. A 340 is above the reported average in all 8 graduate fields ETS publishes data for, and there is little room left above it.
A 340 is constrained in a way lower totals are not. With 170 the maximum on each section, only a single combination produce it at all.
It also explains the flat percentiles up here. The published tables run out of headroom — Quant peaks at the 91st percentile, Verbal at the 99th — so additional points cost enormous effort and register as almost no movement.
Whatever you are applying to, the field average is below you. The top of the table is Physical Sciences at 314; a 340 clears it with room.
A field average is a blunt instrument: it blends elite departments with open-enrolment ones. Use it to see whether your score is in the conversation, then look up the two or three programmes you actually care about.
The total is a convenience, not a measurement. ETS scores Verbal and Quant separately and never publishes a combined percentile — a point our GRE percentile calculator makes at length.
At this end the split matters less, simply because there is not much room to be lopsided. A 340 lands between roughly the 91th and 99th percentile whichever way you build it.
Balanced, a 340 is 170 Verbal and 170 Quant — the 99th and 91th 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 340 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 340 through the GRE percentile calculator and check the weaker one against your discipline's average rather than against the other section.
Check your section percentilesThere is nothing left to do with this score. Spend the time on research fit and letters, which are the parts still capable of changing an outcome.
The reported engineering average is 313, so a 340 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 340 that number ranges from the 91th to the 99th percentile.
There isn't one for the total — ETS percentiles each section and never the sum. Built as 170 Verbal and 170 Quant, the published figures are the 99th and 91th.
Comfortably. Every graduate field ETS publishes an average for reports a total below 340.