> (1) there is something very broken for about 60% of submissions My conclusion is that there is an inherent subjectivity involved in judging paper "quality".

> (1) there is something very broken for about 60% of submissions My conclusion is that there is an inherent subjectivity involved in judging paper "quality". Which shouldn't be that surprising; if there were objective criteria we probably wouldn't need humans to do any judging. I dunno if you want to call that a broken system or not, but if this outcome is unavoidable then trying to change it won't improve anything. (I suspect that 60% isn't some magic lower limit and improvement is possible, but I suspect the lower limit is 20-40% at minimum). Realistically, this means that a single acceptance/rejection shouldn't decide the fate of a persons whole career. And they generally don't, it will be an average of many.