🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Verification Help & Guidance

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to get verified for the GitHub Student Developer Pack and have run into a pattern I can't resolve on my own. Posting the full timeline in case someone from GitHub Education or the community can help.

Background:
I'm a currently enrolled university student. My GitHub profile name, billing first/last name, and the name on my official enrollment certificate all match exactly (verified carefully after early rejections).

Timeline of rejections (oldest to newest), all submitted within a fairly short window — roughly 8 attempts total:

1. Rejected — reasons given: school name not visible, no date shown, billing name incomplete
2. Rejected — reasons given: no date shown, billing name incomplete
3. Rejected — reasons given: first/last name mismatch
4. Rejected — reason given: last name mismatch only
5. Rejected — reason given: first name mismatch only
6. Rejected with no specific reason listed at all. For this one attempt, I temporarily masked an unrelated gender tag (female) next to my name with a sticky note before photographing the document — I suspected the OCR system might be reading MOON JEONGBIN (female) as a single name string and flagging it as a mismatch, so I wanted to test whether removing that tag helped. I submitted the original, fully unedited document in every other attempt.
7. Rejected — reasons given: last/first name mismatch, profile name, and a new reason: "account was recently created, please wait a few days" — submitted with the original unedited document again
8. Rejected — same four reasons as #7, also with the original document

What's confusing me:

• Name mismatch reasons appeared even in early rejections when the name was already an exact match — the automated checker seems to be flagging things incorrectly.
• Submission #6 (the one with the masked gender tag) produced a completely different type of rejection — no specific reasons at all, just a blanket denial.
• After that, even going back to the fully original, unedited document, a brand new reason ("account recently created") started appearing that had never shown up before, and continues to appear on every subsequent attempt with the original file.
• Given the ~8 attempts in a short time span, I'm wondering if this is actually a rate-limit/cooldown flag on the account rather than a document issue at all — the shifting and sometimes contradictory reasons make me suspect the automated reviewer may not be re-evaluating the document each time.

I want to be clear I wasn't trying to falsify or forge anything — the gender tag was masked as a temporary test on one single attempt, and the original document was used for every other submission, including the two most recent ones.

What I've already tried:

• Confirmed profile name, billing name, and document name are all identical
• Logged out/in, cleared cache, tried different browsers and a mobile device
• Waited between attempts
• Contacted support — received an automated response stating individual manual reviews are no longer offered and was redirected here

Has anyone dealt with something similar — either a masked/edited image triggering a longer-term flag, or a cooldown from too many attempts in a short period? Is there anything else I can do besides waiting, or is manual review genuinely no longer possible in any form?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated — thank you.