GitHub Education verification repeatedly rejected despite valid documentation

[Sapro1]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Verification Help & Guidance

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to verify my student status for GitHub Education, but my verification has been rejected multiple times by the automated verification system.

I'm a currently enrolled student in Croatia, and I'm using an official certificate offered by my country's school portal (you can download various certificates and records, and it has all the data that GitHub looks for) as my academic affiliation document. The certificate contains:

My full first and last name
The complete official name of my school
Confirmation of my student/enrollment status
A current date
An official verification/reference number
The official documentation/format

The document is in Croatian, so I also provided an English translation alongside the original document, as GitHub's verification instructions suggest.

However, I keep receiving essentially the same rejection messages:

"The text in the photo you used was unable to be read."

"The image you selected does not appear to contain your school name."

"Your document does not appear to include a date demonstrating current academic affiliation."

"Please ensure that your academic affiliation document contains your first name exactly as it appears in your GitHub billing information."

The information mentioned in these messages is clearly present on the original document. I've also checked that my first and last name on my GitHub profile match the document exactly.

I've tried submitting the document again, including an English translation, but the automated verification continues to reject it.

Has anyone from Croatia successfully verified GitHub Education using a certificate, or had a similar issue with the automated verification system failing to read an official document?

If anyone knows of a specific way to format/present the certificate so that GitHub's verification system recognizes it, I'd really appreciate some advice.

The country's school portal is called e-Dnevnik, and there is also a stamp from the Ministry of Science, Education, and Youth and from the Croatian Academic and Research Network (including a website to verify the authenticity of the document).

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[alastrm]

the bot seems to choke pretty often on digital pdfs and merged translations.

1. print it out on paper first. don't upload the pdf or a screenshot from e-dnevnik, try taking an actual photo of the physical document with your phone. some people report better results with a real photo, although the verifier is inconsistent.

2. upload only the original croatian document first. don't stitch the english translation into the same image unless github specifically asks for it. having two languages and two different layouts can make the ocr less reliable.

3. check your name in settings -> billing and plans -> payment information. it has to match the certificate exactly, including spelling and characters like č, ć, etc. github uses the billing information for this check, not just your public profile name.

4. turn off vpn/proxies and submit it from a normal connection. location can also be part of the verification.

basically, give the verifier the cleanest possible photo of the original document with no editing or extra text around it. if it still rejects the same official document, it's probably the automated verification itself failing rather than the certificate being invalid.

[Sapro1]

Already tried all of those; the education application doesn't even allow images that aren't taken live. And even when you do take the image live, the quality of the whole image is ruined.