So what does an A* actually buy you? Most people in CS will say the label matters and then go quiet when you ask why.
Here's the plain version. CORE 2023 sorts computer science conferences from A* at the top, then A, B, C. The ranking blends citation impact, selectivity, and reputation surveys. An A* venue accepts a small fraction of submissions, and the papers that survive tend to set the conversation in their subfield for a year or two. That's the whole story. It's a selectivity signal, not a quality guarantee.
The part everyone gets wrong: there is no single A* list. It's per subfield. The A* venues in machine learning are not the A* venues in software engineering or HCI or theory. A paper that's a borderline reject at a flagship ML conference might be a strong accept at the top venue in its actual niche. Submitting to the biggest name instead of the right name is, in my experience, the most common prestige mistake in the field.
The lists move, too. CORE updates its rankings. Venues rise and fall. Workshops grow up into conferences that matter. A ranking from five years ago is a rumor, not data, which is why I prefer pulling tiers from a conference ranking database API by discipline instead of a saved PDF. Programmatic access means the tier you see is the current one, and you can sort top conferences by discipline without eyeballing ten different lists.
Be honest about what the tier is for. On a CV, A* signals selectivity to people outside your niche. Inside your niche, everybody already knows which venues are strong. If your whole audience is fifty specialists, the B-tier workshop they all attend beats the A* venue none of them read. I've said this to students and watched them wince. It's still true.
The academic venue finder at confjournal.fyi tags venues with their current CORE tiers, Scimago quartiles, and impact factors, so you filter by prestige level instead of guessing.
When the paper is ready, confjournal.fyi will get it submission-ready with paper formatting and submission checks for your target venue.