Marcos Fact Checks

MISSING CONTEXT: Bongbong Marcos featured as University of Oxford notable alumnus

Rappler.com

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

MISSING CONTEXT: Bongbong Marcos featured as University of Oxford notable alumnus
Marcos did not finish any bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford. EduRank's list of notable alumni is not limited to those who have graduated or finished a degree.
At a glance
  • Claim: Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is an alumnus of the University of Oxford, based on a list of the university’s notable alumni created by the website EduRank.
  • Rating: MISSING CONTEXT
  • The facts: Marcos did not finish any bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford. EduRank’s list of notable alumni is not limited to those who have graduated or finished a degree.
  • Why we fact-checked this: Facebook posts making this claim were sent to the Facebook group “Fact-checking in the Philippines” for verification. As of writing, posts sharing the link to the claim have gained a total of 52,000 combined Facebook interactions.
Complete details

A screenshot of an article listing Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. as one of University of Oxford’s notable alumni has been circulating online. On Facebook, posts sharing the link to the article have gained a total of 52,000 interactions. These have been sent to the Facebook group “Fact-checking in the Philippines” for verification.

Pages in Facebook have been using the link in response to previous fact checks on Marcos graduating from the University of Oxford.

The inclusion of Marcos in EduRank’s top Oxford alumni is missing context.

Marcos did not finish any degree from University of Oxford. In 2015, a spokesperson for the University of Oxford clarified that Marcos did not complete any Bachelor’s degree from the university, instead only receiving a special diploma in 1978.

Robert Wilkins, a tutor at St. Edmund’s Hall (the equivalent of a college in the University of Oxford), explained that a special diploma is given to students who have failed their first year preliminary examinations, disqualifying them from obtaining a Bachelor’s degree.

The Oxford Philippines Society, an accredited organization in the University of Oxford, also released a statement clarifying that Marcos failed his preliminary examinations and therefore did not finish his degree.

On Wednesday, October 27, Rappler got an email response from Oxford’s Information Compliance Team, saying Bongbong Marcos’ special diploma was “not a full graduate diploma.”

EduRank’s list of notable alumni is not limited to those who have graduated or finished a degree in each listed institution. It also includes famous “former students along with research and academic staff.”

Furthermore, the data EduRank uses in its lists are not directly sourced from the universities themselves, rather from other publicly-available data sources and online aggregation platforms.

EduRank is a website that posts global rankings of universities. In their Terms of Use page, EduRank states that it is managed by DataJam Group, whose website has only been created in 2021.

This is not the first time that claims on Bongbong’s education have been found to be false. Marcos’ name is also absent from the alumni database of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a school that he previously claimed to have graduated from.

In a 2016 interview, Marcos insisted that his education in the University of Oxford ended in a bachelor’s degree, despite a report being released a year prior that debunked these claims. – Dylan Salcedo/Rappler.com

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time

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