Can a conference listed as CORE 'A' have an acceptance rate of 60%? My university follows the conference ranking as per CORE. Specifically, the department (Computer Science) encourages the faculty members and the research students to submit to either CORE 'A' or CORE 'A*' conference (It must not be below CORE 'B', in the worst case).

However, I have a general conscience that the acceptance rate of a conference and the quality of the conference are highly related (Does a low acceptance rate imply quality?). Further, conference acceptance rate does influence the final decision on the number of quality papers to be selected for final proceedings (How does the acceptance rate affect papers decisions?).

We have an article and we were planning to submit to a conference ranked as CORE 'A', but it has an acceptance rate of as high as 60% (sometimes more than 61%). However, the conference is quite old (26 years to be precise). So, presently, we are confused whether should we submit the article to the conference and have following recurring questions in mind.


Can my department reject our conference funding because of this high acceptance rate?
Should we rather argue about the quality of the conference based on their ranking system as per CORE? (What if the department refute?)
Should we step back from submitting here? (But then, there is no better conference in the field in this year. We have to soak our paper for at least 7-8 months more.)
Acceptance rate has some correlation to conference quality, but I think it's far from being the most meaningful metric, and it isn't very informative in isolation.

There can be top-tier conferences that have the same, or even higher, acceptance rate than second-tier conferences. The reason is that people know how demanding they are, so they don't even bother to submit papers that they know will be very likely rejected, while the second-tier conference might get more submissions as people have higher hopes of getting their papers accepted.

I personally think CORE is rather trustworthy (at least as far as rankings go), as in my particular subfield it's accurate. But this may depend on each subfield. If you want more evidence for the quality (or lack of) of that conference, this website aggregates three different conference rankings. And if you prefer something more quantitative, there are the Google Scholar h5-index rankings, although they should be taken with a grain of salt because this metric is very influenced by size (number of articles published per year).