Reply to Letter to Editor regarding the article, “Competency-based medical education and the McNamara fallacy: Assessing the important or making the assessed important?”

T Singh¹, N Shah²,  
¹ Center for Health Professions Education, Adesh University, Bathinda, India
² Department of Psychiatry, Smt. NHL Municipal Medical College and SVPIMSR, Ahmedabad, India

Correspondence Address:
N Shah
Department of Psychiatry, Smt. NHL Municipal Medical College and SVPIMSR, Ahmedabad
India

Full Text



We are extremely grateful to Indrayan^[1] for reading and responding to our paper.^[2] McNamara disregarded actual dynamics of the war situation, such as the spirit of the people fighting the war, their resistance and guerrilla warfare, feelings of the rural Vietnamese people, and the local forest conditions, and instead counted the number of dead bodies to judge the Vietnam war. Indrayan^[1] has disregarded the global educational trends, views of renowned competency-based medical education experts published in the world's best journals on medical education as recent as 2022, and our reasoning, and instead counted the number of times we used the words “assess” and “qualitative”, as a measure to judge our paper. The tendency to focus on numbers, metrics, and quantifiable data while disregarding the meaningful qualitative aspects was the central theme of our paper and this letter has immensely helped to effectively re-enforce our point by providing a real-life textbook example of the McNamara fallacy. Need we say anything more?

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