Why is my acceptance rate only 97%? I thought it should be higher

Question

I think the calculation of the acceptance rate has an issue when there is a deleted answer to a question.

Have a look at my profile: https://stackoverflow.com/users/351893/jochenjung

I have all answers accepted, except for two questions which have no answers. Still, my acceptance rate is only 97%.

If I remember correctly, one of the two questions had an answer once, which was deleted (it's not visible anymore). I guess this is the reason why that question without answers is still being counted against my acceptance rate.

Answer 1

If you hover over the accept rate display, it will tell you how the accept rate was calculated. (It's a fairly complicated thing, with lots of stipulations for eligibility and exceptions.) For yours, I see:

Looking at your profile, I see that the eligible one for which you haven't accepted an answer is this one. It's eligible because it has received at least one answer.

And I'm not very good at math, but my calculator assures me that this works out to be correct:

(32 / 33) * 100 = 96.97 ≈ 97

The two questions with 0 answers (this one, and this one) are not being included because it is impossible to accept an answer when one has not been provided. The fact that one of them has an answer that has since been deleted is irrelevant.

All of that said, seriously? Your accept rate is 97%. You have absolutely no reason to worry about your accept rate. As long as it's over 50%, I promise that you're doing just fine. Most importantly, do not feel forced into accepting an answer just to get your accept rate up. You should only accept an answer when it has actually been helpful to you in solving your problem. If not, leave the question open and let someone else come by and answer it more satisfactorily. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that; in fact, it's completely by design.

Answer 2

In my opinion, 97% is too high — unless you're asking really easy questions. When they launched the feature, Jeff made a comment that 70% was closer to the expected value and other stats released show that something more like 90% of questions actually get answers with at least one upvoted answer (the criteria to fall off the "unanswered" view). If your question doesn't get a perfect answer, don't feel pressured to mark it accepted.

This feature is most useful for those new users that have close to 0% rates. It helps them understand that they do need to make use of the accept button.