Persistent Automated Name Mismatch Rejection (Billing & Profile Already Synced)

[mutalibcs]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Verification Help & Guidance

Hi everyone,

I am encountering repeated automated rejections for the GitHub Student Developer Pack due to a name mismatch error, even after aligning all profile and billing details.

Rejection Notices Received:

• Academic affiliation document must contain first and last name exactly as in billing info.
• GitHub user profile must have the full name matching the academic document.

Steps Already Taken:

1. GitHub Public Profile: Updated the Name field to Md Abdul Mutalib exactly as printed on my university credentials.
2. GitHub Billing Information: Matched the First and Last name fields to Md Abdul and Mutalib, as well as testing single-name alignment.
3. Session: Logged out completely, cleared browser cache, and logged back in before submitting.
4. Document: Provided a valid, high-resolution academic document showing my current enrollment and full legal name clearly.

Because my legal name contains multiple parts (Md Abdul Mutalib), the automated OCR system appears unable to parse and validate it against the billing/profile fields.

Could a GitHub Education moderator or team member assist with a manual verification review, or advise on how to structure multi-part names so the automated parser accepts them?

Thank you for your support.

[sharyaropensource]

This is a known limitation, not something wrong on your end the automated verifier is built around a two-field First / Last name model, and it struggles with names that have more than two components, especially with abbreviations like "Md" (short for Mohammad/Muhammad), which the OCR/matching step doesn't reliably parse as part of the given name. You'll see the same complaint from other students with South and East Asian names in several other threads here.

Two things worth knowing before you keep retrying:

1. Don't just keep resubmitting with new name splits. Repeated rejections in a short window can lower trust in the automated system rather than help — it's not just about finding the "right" split.
2. This category doesn't route to manual review. GitHub Education staff don't manually review or approve cases through Community Discussions — the automated bot reply you got confirms this thread is logged as general feedback, not escalated to a person. To get an actual human to look at your case, you need to go through the official support channel:

• Go to https://support.github.com/contact
• Choose GitHub Education as the topic (if that's greyed out or breaks, submit a general ticket instead and select "Other")
• In the ticket, include:
  • Your GitHub username
  • A short, clear explanation: your legal name has three parts (Md Abdul Mutalib), "Md" is a standard abbreviation for Mohammad/Muhammad in your naming convention, and it doesn't map to GitHub's first/last name fields
  • State plainly that your profile name, billing name, and document all show the same name, and ask for manual verification review
  • Re-attach your academic document

Support has manually approved similar multi-part-name mismatches for other students in the past once it's explained clearly — it just has to go through the ticket system rather than this forum. Worth mentioning your country/university in the ticket too, since some regions get flagged for extra review either way.

Hope that gets you unblocked let us know how the ticket goes.