Seniors of my college are asking to star 2 repo of their as a task requirement

[dvm-sh]

Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Discussion Content

Seniors of my college are saying in a Whatsapp group of around 400+ members ( mostly freshers ) to star 2 repository ( maybe thier own repo ) as a task mandatory ( idk why ) stating that " from this we will able to track your engagement and Your performance, participation, and activity data will be shared with the XYZ Placement and Training Cell as well as the Hiring Partner of Geeks2Code, Wayzyy "
I wanna ask you all isn't is manipulating the ranking ?

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[iawaisahmd]

yes, requiring hundreds of students to star specific repositories as a mandatory task would make those stars less organic and could artificially increase the repositories' popularity signals. more importantly, github stars aren't a reliable way to measure an individual student's performance or participation. if engagement needs to be tracked, commits, pull requests, issues, or classroom assignments would provide much more meaningful evidence.

[dvm-sh]

SO I can also report it to github ?

[vek08]

Yes, I think there is a legitimate concern here. GitHub stars are used as a signal of repository interest, and GitHub states that many of its repository rankings depend on the number of stars

If students are being required to star specific repositories as a mandatory task, rather than starring them because they genuinely find the projects useful, wouldn't that artificially inflate the repositories' star counts and potentially affect their visibility/ranking?

I understand tracking students' engagement for placement purposes, but using mandatory stars as an engagement metric seems different from measuring genuine interest or contribution. It would be interesting to know whether GitHub considers this acceptable platform usage

[dvm-sh]

i have already complained about this to github support lets see what will be there response, its been more than 48 hours.