FALSE: CHED says LET is ‘toughest exam to pass’

Claim: The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) said the Licensure Exam for Teachers (LET) is the toughest license exam to pass in the Philippines.

The claim was made in a text article published by OKD2.com in 2017, entitled “Not Bar, CHED Says LET is Now the Toughest PH License Exam to Pass.”

This article resurfaced again on Thursday, April 23, when it was shared in the Facebook group LET Reviewer Online Philippines. As of writing, the post has gained at least 1,000 reactions, 96 comments, and 1,100 shares.

A reader sent the claim to Rappler for verification.

Rating: FALSE

The facts: CHED did not issue this statement, and the “assistant commissioner” cited in the article is fake.

The article published on June 7, 2017 attributes this quote to a certain CHED Assistant Commissioner Dr Fausta Salcedo: “Engineering board exams mostly deal with solving problems and numbers, doctor’s exam deals only with the human body, BAR deals primarily with the Philippine Constitution. Teachers deal with everything from what a child has learned when he started going to school at Grade 1 until he finished college.”

However, according to CHED chairman Prospero de Vera III, in 2017, there was no CHED Commissioner by the name of Fausta Salcedo. In addition, CHED has no “assistant commissioner” position and there was no one with that name who served the agency. De Vera also labeled the article as “fake.”

In October 2017, then CHED chairperson Patricia Licuanan said the poor performance of schools for teachers in the LET was due to several factors like the need to upgrade the curriculum, schools’ admission standards, and difficulty in monitoring teacher education programs.

Moreover, OKD2.com is one of the sites that was regularly shared by troll accounts spotted in 2016. (READ: Fake accounts, manufactured reality on social media) 

In the past, the website has been fact-checked by Rappler and Vera Files. Some of its false articles include one that claimed the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) condemned the killing of two terrorist leaders in Marawi and another that claimed former president Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino III jeered at President Rodrigo Duterte over the time it took to kill those terrorists. The CBCP also flagged OKD2.com as a website that carries “fake or unverified contents.” – Loreben Tuquero/Rappler.com

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