Student application rejected – name and school name match, need help (Belarus)

[Vitalikdeve]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Verification Help & Guidance

Hi everyone,

Hi everyone,

My Student Developer Pack application was rejected on August 22, 2026 with these reasons:

• The image does not appear to contain the school name
• First name / last name in the academic document does not match GitHub billing information
• GitHub profile name must match the academic document

I have already:

• Updated Billing Information name to exactly match my passport and the English translation of the document
• Updated the Name field in my GitHub public profile to the same spelling
• Logged out and logged back in after the changes

The document is an official enrollment notice from Belarusian State Academy of Communications + English translation placed next to the original. Both the full school name and my full legal name are clearly visible.

If any GitHub Education staff or moderators see this post, I am ready to privately send all the full documents and screenshots proving my student status.

Could someone advise what else I should check or try?
Has anyone from Belarus (or with non-English documents) successfully passed verification recently?

Thank you!

[justin24er]

Hey, this looks like a classic OCR/automated-scan issue rather than an actual problem with your document, the automated verifier scans images for text it recognizes, and non-English documents with translations placed side-by-side often confuse it, it may be reading the wrong section or failing to detect the school name because it's in Cyrillic script rather than matching against the English translation next to it.

A couple things worth trying before going back through manual review:

• Make sure the school name appears in English somewhere clearly legible and high-resolution in the same image, not just as a stamp/letterhead in Cyrillic, sometimes cropping the photo tighter around just the translated text (name + school + date) helps the scanner pick it up better than a full-page shot with both languages.

• Double check there's no residual mismatch like a middle name order difference (many Belarusian documents list surname first), even if you've matched spelling, name order mismatches trip the same automated check.

Since you've already fixed billing and profile name and it still failed, this really does need a human reviewer, not just a reapply. Go through education.github.com -> Get Help and submit a support ticket explicitly stating: your billing/profile name now matches, the document is a genuine enrollment notice with an English translation included, and ask for manual document review since the automated OCR check seems to be misreading the translated section. Attach the same document again there.

Also yes, there are plenty of past cases of non-English/translated documents from Eastern Europe eventually getting approved after manual review, it just usually takes that support escalation rather than reapplying blind.