Verification rejected

[qiaoshouzi]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Verification Help & Guidance

Hi everyone,

I am a high school student from China. I am trying to apply for GitHub Student Developer Pack using the official bilingual (Chinese/English) transcript and enrollment certificate provided by my school. However, my application keeps getting rejected with the reason that the name on the documents does not match my billing information.

To investigate the issue, I captured the network packets during the submission process to check the quality of the uploaded image. While the web preview looked blurry, I initially assumed a high-definition version would be sent to the server. However, the packet capture revealed that the actual uploaded image is compressed to an extremely low resolution, making the text completely illegible.

I am not sure if this is a bug, as I know other students have successfully passed the automated OCR verification. Currently, it seems impossible to capture the entire document while keeping the text clear enough for the system to read at this upload quality.

Many community discussions suggest contacting the support team for a manual review when the automated system fails. However, when I visit https://support.github.com/contact/education, the page states that manual reviews are currently not accepted, and I am unable to open a new ticket.

How should I proceed under these circumstances? Any advice or help from the community or GitHub staff would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much!

[RAAJK20Pro]

Honestly this does sound more like an upload/compression issue than a document mismatch issue.

If the uploaded image becomes extremely low quality after submission, the OCR system probably cannot read the text properly, so it ends up failing name verification automatically.

You could try:

• uploading a cropped version focused only on the important text
• using PNG instead of JPG
• taking the photo in better lighting
• scanning the document instead of using a camera photo
• trying from desktop instead of mobile browser

Since you already checked the uploaded packet preview and confirmed the quality loss, that’s actually useful debugging info and makes this seem more like a platform-side processing issue.

[asaddevx]

Hey @qiaoshouzi,

You have done some really detailed debugging. The upload compression is not a bug — it is how GitHub processes images, and it is causing your document to become unreadable.

Why it is failing

The automated system needs to read your name clearly . Your document looks fine to you, but after GitHub compresses it, the text becomes too blurry for their system to recognize .

What you can do

Try these fixes for a clearer upload:

1. Scan instead of taking a photo — Use a scanner app like CamScanner or Microsoft Lens. Scan directly to PDF or high-quality PNG.

2. Crop tightly — Remove extra white space around the document. Focus only on the section showing your name, school name, and date.

3. Use PNG, not JPG — PNG compression is less aggressive than JPG.

4. Take photo in bright, even light — No shadows. No glare. Place document flat on a table.

5. Use desktop browser — Upload from a computer, not a phone. Some phone browsers compress more aggressively.

If none of this works:

GitHub is not accepting manual review tickets for Education applications right now . Your only option is to keep reapplying with better quality images until the automated system accepts you.

One more thing — check your name match:

Make sure your GitHub profile name matches exactly what is on your transcript . If your transcript has "Li Ming" but GitHub says "Ming Li", that will also cause rejection.

Bottom line

The compression issue is real, but not fixable on GitHub's side. Your only path is to keep submitting higher quality images — scanned, cropped, well-lit, PNG format — until the system can read them. Many students eventually succeed with the right document setup.