Mall of Qatar is now open!

Today was the soft opening of the Mall of Qatar. A friend and I, as well as a few thousand others, went on opening day to take a look.

There's a five-star hotel attached to the mall, which is also open. It's operated by Hilton Hotels.

The mall is huge! It might be the largest mall in Qatar. Carrefour is the supermarket, like everywhere else. Not every shop in the mall is open of course but here's some stores that I don't think are elsewhere in Qatar (after this I'll show you the restaurants). All of these were open.

What about food?

Finally, coming soon . . . .

Geez, that's a lot of shops, and that's without the many shops that you also find in the malls (except for the Tim Hortons I tried to limit the pictures to new shops or places with maybe one other location in Doha).

If I take pictures of any changes I'll update this blog post so check back occasionally if you don't get a chance to get out there yourself.

PISA 2015 Results are Now Available

Prepare yourself for tons of news articles discussing your country's educational system and how well it's doing, or alarmist headlines about how poorly your country is doing, the results from the PISA 2015 test are out!

The PISA test is a test given out to a wide sample of 15-year-old students in countries from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the OECD). Non-OECD countries can also be included in the program if they wish and Qatar has since 2006. The test is pretty comprehensive and looks at how well the students understand reading, mathematics and science. It's not a rote memorization test, to do well you have to be able to understand the material and apply it.

The results were released today and I guarantee you major newspapers around the world are pouring over the numbers and writing articles about how good/bad students did and thus how their educational system compares to other countries. UK papers absolutely love trashing on the UK because of this test, even though UK students tend to do pretty good, just not as good as some other countries. Singapore was #1 in all three categories.

For all of its wealth Qatar has never done well with the PISA test. In the early years it was scoring around the same level as much poorer countries such as Peru or Kyrgyzstan. Over time the scores have steadily improved, but there’s a long way to go before the scores or even comparable to OCED nations. So let’s see how Qatar did (I included the OECD average as well for comparison):

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/

Reading

OECD average
2006 492
2009 493
2012 496
2015 490

Qatar
2006 312
2009 372
2012 388
2015 402



Mathematics

OECD average
2006 499
2009 496
2012 494
2015 490

Qatar
2006 318
2009 368
2012 376
2015 402


Science

OECD average
2006 500
2009 501
2012 501
2015 493

Qatar
2006 349
2009 379
2012 384
2015 418


Okay, so the scores are up yet again, which is great. Also the average OECD score declined slightly across all three categories, maybe the test was a little bit tougher in which case the increase Qatar has shown is even better. Reading is up +14, Math +26 and Science an impressive +34 from the previous test. Slowly but surely Qatar is climbing up the rankings and its scores are now similar to countries that 6-10 years ago were well ahead. Qatar is now scoring roughly the same as countries such as Thailand, Columbia and Mexico.

It means there is still a long way to go though. Large swaths of the student population are just not able to understand and apply the material. PISA separates a students level of understanding into six categories (with 6 being the highest and 1 the lowest). The main table not only had the scores but also the percentage of students who scored level 5 or 6 in at least one subject, and the percentage of students who scored below level 2 in all three subjects. Qatar did not perform well when compared to Western countries. Below are some select countries for comparison:

Share of top performers in at least one subject (Level 5 or 6):

39.1% Singapore
25.8% Japan
21.4% Finland
22.7% Canada
18.4% Australia
16.9% UK
19.2% Germany
13.3% USA
18.4% France
3.4% Qatar


Share of low achievers in all three subjects (below Level 2)

4.8% Singapore
5.6% Japan
6.3% Finland
5.9% Canada
11.1% Australia
10.1% UK
9.8% Germany
13.6% USA
14.8% France
42.0% Qatar

Yep, 42% of the students scored poorly in all three categories. That's three times higher than the USA. Improvements in education in Qatar do not seem to really be reaching the students who need the most help, or perhaps the system still focuses on rote memorization.

Anyway there is tons more data and analysis available, the main report itself is 494 pages, and many countries have separate country-specific reports on top of that. Some countries even have statistics by region within a country so you can compare the different regions (Canada has some scores by each province, the Canadian news will be jumping on which provinces did better than others). There’s even analysis by gender, socio-economic background, whether the student was an immigrant, and so forth. Take some time to look over the detailed results.

Doha News Website Blocked in Qatar

Unfortunately a few days ago both telecom providers here in Qatar blocked the Doha News website, dohanews.co . Readers of this blog will be familiar with Doha News as I frequently link to their stories, and they sometimes cite a blog post of mine, or a couple of times asked me to do opinion articles for them. If you are reading this from outside Qatar then you'll still be able to see their website but for people in Qatar it's blocked. No reason was given before the weekend began, so there was little chance of a statement from the Government until tomorrow when it's a workday again.

Hopefully this will be sorted out soon. According to the Doha News team they had no prior warning nor any kind of message from the Government or a Ministry that something was wrong. There's rampant speculation of course, was it that article about WXYZ? or maybe that one about ABCD? I'd prefer to wait until there is a response from the Government instead of speculating. I think this is the first time something like this has happened to them.

For people in Qatar you can still keep up with them via their facebook and twitter feeds. As far as I can tell Doha News is continuing to post articles.

Whoever wanted to block the site was not aware of the Streisand Effect. By blocking Doha News it's become a big story in Qatar on social media. Some world media have also picked up the story, such as the BBC, Reuters, and Amnesty International, so I think it would be in the best interest of the Government to look into what happened and stop blocking the website.