There are lies, damn lies and dreamed up numbers being passed as statistics. I think this is the archetypical case of :

 - Bad sampling

 - Guessing numbers based on other numbers that ought to be correlated but they aren't (HDI for example).

The average standard 8 student would beat the average O level student in Mauritius. 

An average O level student there wouldn't know what to do with long division or long multiplication .