A 311 is roughly the average admitted score in several fields and short of it in others. Which one you are applying to decides the answer.
A 311 is the average admitted score in some fields and below it in others, which makes the honest answer to "is it good" depend on a question this page cannot answer for you: what are you applying to?
Average, roughly. A 311 matches what several fields report and misses what others do — 5 clear, 3 short.
Nobody at a graduate department opens your report and looks for 311. They look for the section their programme cares about, and that number is not visible from the total.
At a 311 the spread is enormous: depending on how the points are distributed, one of your sections could sit anywhere from the 6th to the 99th percentile. That is the range a single total is hiding.
Split evenly, a 311 is 156/155, which ETS puts at the 70th percentile for Verbal and the 37th for Quant. That gap is not an error; the Quant distribution is simply far more crowded at the high end.
Against the field averages ETS publishes, a 311 clears 5 and falls short of 3. The ones it clears include Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities, Biological Sciences; the nearest one it misses is Engineering, which averages 313.
The averages tell you where the middle of a discipline sits, which is useful right up to the point you pick specific departments. After that, only their published numbers matter.
The single most useful decision from a 311 is which section to fix. Splitting your study time evenly is the default, and it is almost always wrong — one section is further from your field's expectation, and that is the one worth the hours.
The arithmetic favours Quant on an even split. Its percentile is the lower of the two, which means there is more room per scaled point than on the other section.
The stack that works: targeted verbal or quant drilling, a two-month plan, and timed practice tests to confirm the gains survive the clock.
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 percentilesWorth considering, with a condition: name the section and the target before you book. A 311 responds well to focused work and poorly to another general pass through the material.
The comparison to make is section against field average, not total against rule of thumb. If both halves are close to par, another sitting buys very little.
A retake makes sense here if you can name the section you are fixing. If you cannot, the extra months rarely pay.
The total is mostly an administrative convenience. What varies — and what gets read — is the section score, which at a 311 can sit anywhere from the 6th to the 99th percentile.
ETS publishes no combined percentile. What it does publish, for an even 156/155 split, is the 70th percentile on Verbal and the 37th on Quant.
Split decision: above average in 5 fields, below in 3. Which you are applying to settles it.
The range runs 141/170 through 170/141. A balanced 311 is 156 Verbal with 155 Quant.