Abject clones of other projects with no local commits, or minimal ones. Projects that just mashed together some other projects in a package. Projects that had a bunch of README content, but no actual code, or code that was minimal. (The few times I've seen school projects, they've been terrible . . . which is fine for a school project, but why make that public on github?)

My guess is that, in general, the submitters wanted to look good to people (e.g., HR) who were not technical. They sure didn't pass a "I want to continue looking at this person" filter.