[santaclaus]

Weird, I've had a very different experience reviewing for two big ACM conferences. The rejected papers are usually a bit too narrow of a contribution, but you'll usually see them appear in respected smaller venues soon after. Most of the horrible unacceptable work gets culled out in earlier passes before reviewers even see it.

[more_original]

ACM has a wide range of conferences. There are conferences with an A* ranking, but also ones with a C ranking. Submissions to A*-conferences are not 80% garbage.

http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/?search=acm&by=all

[GuiA]

Your link shows that over 75% of the conferences are B or lower. So sure, the submissions to A* conferences are not 80% garbage, but these conferences are 4% of the total. Not really representative of academic work as a whole.

[eli_gottlieb]

Oh hey, cool! My paper writing up my MSc thesis was at a B-grade conference with a 26% acceptance rate. That's actually more selective than I expected, given my opinion of my own work.

[more_original]

Sure, I was just giving a possible reason for the different experiences of reviewing for ACM conferences.