Last week, the UK's postgraduate support body, Vitae, published a survey of distance learning and part-time doctorates. The next day in the UK, universities and the higher education press were pouring over the results from the annual National Student Survey, extrapolating a general rule about the state of universities from every dropped percentage point. Meanwhile, as an ongoing feature of this time of the academic year, many postgraduates will be busy filling in questionnaires for their graduate schools.

It sometimes seems as if higher education is fuelled by two things: money, and survey results. But whilst entire university administration departments are dedicated to designing questionnaires, or to dissecting their results, should individual academics or postgraduate teaching assistants seek feedback on their own teaching? In this blog post, I want to share my own experience (or initial lack of it) in designing surveys to direct my own teaching. But before thinking about the methods of questionnaire design, it is worth stressing why feedback is such a vital tool for teaching, even at the early stage of an academic career in which I find myself.

If UK academics want to apply to the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the national centre for teaching excellence, to receive accreditation - often, for early-career researchers, at the Associate level - all they need to do is to fill in a form describing their teaching activities in two "areas of activity" from a list of five. These include assessing students, planning a lesson, or providing a supportive environment in which students can learn.

Area 1, for instance, asks the applicant to:

Identify the ways in which you contribute to the design and planning of learning activities. These might include involvement in the design or redesign of curricula, courses and programmes of study and/or identifying and planning different kinds of interaction with learners in various contexts for single sessions or larger programmes.

Perhaps you have held a tutorial with a group of students, planned a seminar or even given a lecture. Surely all you need to do, then, is to state what you have taught - books you have used, for example - just as you would on a CV?

The catch comes with the subsequent sentence, a mantra that is repeated beneath all of the other areas of activity:

Please give reasons for your choice of learning content, activities and techniques and how they relate to developing the learners' understanding of the subject. Please explain how you know that your work is effective and how you try to improve it.

These repeated sentences represent the tip of the huge, foundational move that has taken place in universities over the last two decades. This is the shift towards "student-centred learning."

At first, this might seem like one of those clever-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrases so beloved of technocrats. Surely universities have always had students at their centre? But consider the case of the professor who stands in front of the blackboard in a stuffy lecture theatre, droning on for an hour about some scrawl behind him, to which he occasionally gestures with an absent hand. I am sure you have encountered this stereotype at some point in your education. In response to a lecturer like this, you might well have buried your head in your hands and your eyes in your textbooks, believing that the reason you cannot understand the material or find it so dull is not that the lecturer is bad, but rather than he is so brilliant and the material he is teaching so difficult that you will never understand it. You may even have fallen for that fallacy that the worse the teacher, the better the student you must become, because you are being forced to study independently in order to understand.

Student-centred learning attempts to send such lecturers up in a (metaphorical) puff of smoke, turning attention instead to students. Lecturers should not plan lessons in ways that they find easiest to teach; and although teaching is often most exciting when at the cutting-edge of research, they should not simply talk about their current career-defining, ultra-complex project because that interests them more than teaching the basics. Rather, lecturers should instead consider what hard knowledge and soft skills they want students to learn by the end of their degree, and think about how students might best go about learning it.

This is what lies behind the HEA's application for Associate Practitioners, with that repeated requirement that you "give reasons for your choice of learning content" and that you "explain how you know that your work is effective and how you try to improve it."

How, though, can one provide this sort of evidence? The clue lies in compulsory Area 5 of the HEA's application form:

This area is about how you use research, scholarly activity and/or professional activities to support learning. Please use this section to give examples of ways in which you draw upon discipline based and pedagogic research, scholarly activity and/or other professional activities in the support of teaching and learning.

No PhD researcher should ever uncritically accept the findings of the latest journal article. Instead, research requires one to evaluate the previous reliability of an author, or to look out for any cunning argumentative tricks or methodological errors that may compromise a paper's findings. Area 5 asks that researchers bring the same evaluative techniques to bear on teaching. How do we know our teaching is effective for students? How do we evaluate whether they are learning in ways that best suit them?

This is where the questionnaire or survey starts to become of value to individual academics, not just to institutions focused on the latest league tables. Whilst good teachers will always be able to pick up on the vibes of a classroom, and sense whether students are engaged with the material they are teaching, there is no substitute for hard evidence of teaching effectiveness, just as in research one would never reject a paper's findings purely on a hunch.

And so onto my own experience. When I started teaching tutorials in English Literature four years ago, I thought I was doing a great job. Not only did I give students preliminary reading to do, I also got them to download podcasts and audio books. Rather than sticking with dusty books, I asked them to do exercises with hypertext editions.

But whilst I may have enjoyed implementing these twenty-first-century practices, when I set about applying to the HEA in 2006, how could I know that these were actually what students wanted? How could I measure whether my teaching techniques were benefiting their learning? In large part, answering this meant designing a survey. And here, I as a literary academic found myself somewhat in the dark - and, by sharing my experiences here, I hope to enlighten others in the same position as I was three years ago.

The first thing I found is that in order to be useful, questions need to be specific. Asking students whether they enjoyed tutorials (or not) might (or might not) do something for my ego, but reveals little about how they are using tutorials for learning. Perhaps they enjoyed tutorials, for example, because I never scheduled them first thing in the morning. Perhaps they were with their friends in my group, and their memories of tutorials are conditioned more by the chatter before and after, than by what actually went on in the classroom.

Even when I later modified this question to ask whether my tutorials were useful in "developing your understanding of course material," I found this did not really help much. At my university, students receive just four one-hour tutorials per year, the rest of teaching taking the form of lectures. Therefore, in preparing for a one-off tutorial, a student will usually read their primary and secondary material carefully, thereby improving their understanding of the course material automatically. Although they may not have perceived it that way when they responded to my question, the exact form of the tutorial may have mattered less than the mere fact of its existence as a key punctuation point in the academic year. Additionally, whilst I try to allow students to do most of the talking and debate in tutorials, with me taking the role of chairperson, I know that other tutors prefer to take a more active role, disseminating ideas and information rather than merely facilitating a debate. Neither approach may be better at ensuring that the preparation for the tutorial, and the contact time itself, become sound platforms for subsequent study. If a student acknowledged that my tutorials had helped their understanding, this did not necessarily mean my way of running tutorials was the best or only way of achieving the same result.

The first recommendation with surveys, then, is to try avoid generalised questions, or to ask them as part of a suite of more detailed ones. Asking whether a student enjoyed or benefited from my tutorials told me little about my teaching. Neither did asking whether it helped their understanding, because a different approach might have been similarly beneficial. In the most recent version of the survey I issued last academic year, I still asked these questions, as they provide an opportunity for students to complain if they really have not enjoyed the tutorials, and for me to get a general sense of student perceptions of me generally (it is not necessarily the case that just because a student may offer lots of valid pointers for improvement, this means your teaching overall is poor). However, I also ask more detailed, follow-up questions. Did students feel they got more out of set tasks (mini-exercises I get them to do in pairs), or when discussing a text as a whole group? Did students use any handouts given in tutorials as a way of pursuing themes developed in the space of the hour's discussion?

I also now ask very specific questions looking ahead to teaching in subsequent years, whilst reflecting on the one just gone. For example, I ask whether students benefited from any online resources or podcasts, and if so whether they think the next generation of students would appreciate more of them. This year, I even asked whether my current students thought future ones would be happy for me to use Facebook in teaching. Their responses to these questions were clear enough to guide my teaching next year decisively. Broadly put, yes to more online resources and podcasts, but no way can I use Facebook for teaching, breaking the boundary between academic teacher and student socialite.

Another trick I have discovered with surveys is to introduce them at the start of the year rather than towards the end. This might seem counter-intuitive, and against the way surveys usually run at universities. How can students comment on a course when they have not yet completed it? However, I realised that presenting the questionnaire at the start of the year would have two benefits.

Firstly, when I hand out the questionnaires at our first meeting, it forms a sort of contract between student and teacher. By indicating that I value their pedagogic feedback and will try act upon it, this implies that I will also value any literary comments they might make in tutorials. I may be the "teacher," but that does not make me God, and giving them the opportunity to criticise my teaching also illustrates the point that my ideas about a text should not be viewed as the "right" answers. This is critical in English literature, which is a discursive rather than fact-based subject.

Secondly, one of the well-recognised problems with questionnaires is that they tend to represent polarised opinions. Either students who have hated a course use them to sound off all their grumbles, even if they do not originate with you, or students who have loved the course praise the teacher, even if it is really the selection of books or material that they have liked. In previous years, I have experienced both sides of the equation in my survey results. What can be missing is the intermediate students who have liked some aspects but not others. It is hard to make concrete changes in response either to total demolition or praise, whereas students with balanced views can be more specific about what was good or bad about your teaching.

Therefore, issuing a questionnaire at the start of the year helps to encourage comments on individual aspects of teaching that can be enhanced as the year progresses, rather than coming to light only retrospectively, in a sweeping appraisal at the end. Last year, for example, after one tutorial a student commented that the questions about a novel which I asked in preparation for that tutorial did not really align with the essay questions asked in the exam at the end of the year. A fair point, and one I could rectify straight away in later teaching.

A final move I made this year, to hone the process I had started when applying to the HEA three years ago, was to place the questionnaires online. Though the paper versions never asked a student to put their names on the top, the online environment ensures greater anonymity for students, which is crucial if they are going to offer free judgements. Additionally, I noticed with the paper versions that many respondents simply offered numerical answers (that is, rating for specific questions from 1, good, to 5, bad) rather than giving more useful, written feedback. I guess this is because they felt that they had to answer every question on the written sheet, and so simply dashed through it. In contrast, the online questionnaires often received detailed comments about just one or two aspects - perhaps in response to a particular issue with one tutorial - rather than purely quantitative ratings across the full spread of questions.

I cannot stress enough how beneficial surveys have been for my teaching. Whether it is doing the specific, simple things (such as using more podcasts or keeping well away from Facebook), confirming my intuitions about how much a group is getting from my teaching, assuaging my ego with positive comments or keeping me on my toes with negative ones, questionnaires force me continually into that position desired by the HEA, where teaching is never statically delivered from the front of a lecture hall, but part of a reciprocal process which sees the student as the key figure in learning.

Given this, I do find it odd that although my own department have been supportive in allowing me to produce my own surveys, I know other postgraduates have had different experiences, because of fears of negative criticism which might lead students, who are after all fee paying clients, to complain formally to their universities, once they realise enough of them feel the same way about poor teaching at their institution. I am also aware that, over four years, my questionnaires have evolved tortuously out of my earlier naivete. I have eventually, I hope, found a good way to ask that all-important, daring question of a student: how effective is my teaching?

[This is a slightly modified cross-post from the Graduate Junction blog.]

The Times this morning reports on the grammar stickler Stefan Gatward who, exasperated by living in a street which was signed "St Johns Close," went around painting apostrophes in the correct location, so that the sign reads, correctly, "St John's Close." Whilst cheered on by some neighbours, others called Mr. Gatward a vandal. One, he explains, even "tried to tell me that the Post Office would not deliver to the street if you put an apostrophe on the address."

It is now six years since Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was first published, providing a militant call to grammar sticklers everywhere. Whilst I do not rate that book particularly highly - Truss seems too severe in describing "proper" language, whereas language is the product of social consensus rather than anything that can be defined from the top - I do appreciate the importance of correct grammar, and can understand why Mr. Gatward might have been so annoyed, wielding his paintbrush in protest.

The key reason for using grammar properly is that it gives a positive impression of the writer, leading the reader to be more confident of the validity of his or her arguments, opinions, or actions. What does it say about a council's efficiency if they cannot produce accurate road signs? What did it tell me about the government's views on the War on Terror when I received a badly-written response from the Home Office a few years ago? It is because grammar implies much about the writer as well as being an aid to the reader that I mark with a heavy red pen on university English Literature essays. If students cannot use language properly themselves, why should I trust their critiques of other authors' use of it?

Another perfect example of why grammar matters arrived in the post yesterday. This was, sadly, a warning of redundancy sent to Mrs. Ishmael. The letter contains numerous errors. The letter invites her to a meeting on "either the 19th of August However..." There are two sentences missing full stops. The letter explains the "principals" (not principles) by which selection for redundancy will be made. It points to section 15 of the staff handbook, which contains information about redundancy; in fact, the relevant section is 13.

So how do you think my Mrs. Ishmael and I felt when she received this letter? Here she was, at risk of losing her job in spite of her excelling in her role, whilst the middle manager who would make that decision was incapable of using language appropriately, and had not even bothered with a basic proof read in such a personally important document.

Sometimes, from my seat in the United Kingdom, it is hard not to laugh at politics in the United States. Take the fierce war about healthcare reform currently being fought in town halls throughout the country. Waking up bleary-eared to the radio news this morning, my ears pricked alert when I heard one woman berating a Democratic senator: "this is about the systematic dismantling of this country...I don't want this country turning into Russia. I don't want this country turning into a socialised country." What Cold War time warp is she stuck in?

But my laughter died and my blood got hot when I turned to this morning's Guardian. This reports that America's right wing is using the National Health Service to exemplify the terrible consequence of state controlled health care.

In television commercials and press releases from the American right wing, misinformation abounds. They report that the NHS puts "an Orwellian financial cap" on the value of human life. An email widely circulated among US voters claims that anyone over 59 in Britain is ineligible for treatment for heart disease. Republican Chuck Grassley says that:

I don't know for sure, but I've heard several senators say that Ted Kennedy with a brain tumour, being 77 years old as opposed to being 37 years old, if he were in England, would not be treated for his disease, because end of life – when you get to be 77, your life is considered less valuable under those systems.

A television advert from the conservative Club for Growth intones a figure of $22,750 whilst, with the backdrop of a Union Jack, a voiceover says: "In England, government health officials have decided that's how much six months of life is worth. If a medical treatment costs more, you're out of luck."

The group Conservatives for Patients' Rights has pages explaining healthcare systems in other, mainly European, countries. In its entry for Great Britain, it claims that in the NHS:

Waiting lists are a huge problem...Some examples: 750,000 are on waiting lists for hospital admission; 40% of cancer patients are never able to see an oncologist; there is explicit rationing for services such as kidney dialysis, open heart surgery and care for the terminally ill.

All of the above claims are at best misinformed, and at worst utter drivel.

There may be large waiting lists in NHS, but the simple number is irrelevant. What matters is waiting times, and as of 2009, no patient has to wait more than 18 weeks between being referred by their doctor and starting their hospital treatment. Most patients will actually start their treatments within 8 weeks. It is also utterly false that patients above a certain age, such as Senator Kennedy, would be denied any treatment.

The statement that 40% of cancer patients never get to see an oncologist is based on a study 15 years old (ironically, when the NHS was chronically underfunded by a conservative, right-wing government), and is no longer accurate. Naturally, though, some cancer patients may never get to see an oncologist, because advanced-stage but recently diagnosed cancers may kill before treatment.

The idea bandied both in the Club for Growth television advertisement, and also by Steven Pollard on the Conservatives for Patients' Rights site, that there is an "Orwellian financial cap on the value of human life" needs qualifying. The claims stem from the fact that when deciding whether to spend NHS money on new drugs, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence applies a cost-utility analysis. If a drug costs more than £30 000 to potentially extend the quality life of a patient by a year, NICE may deny funding for that drug. This is, of course, entirely sensible. Given a limited pot of money - and, yes, even US private health insurance schemes work with these - it would be unethical for one patient to receive an expensive drug to extend their life by one year, thereby meaning that other, cheaper drugs which might extend the lives for more patients for longer are restricted. NICE also offers a barrier against the salesmanship so prevalent in US healthcare, whereby doctors are pressed by the pharmaceuticals to prescribe the latest expensive drug. In the UK, with the health service working with more or less the same suite of drugs under NICE's recommendations, what amounts to bribery of individual doctors can have less of an impact.

One could go on all day exposing the lies behind the US claims, but The Guardian has already done a good job of collating decisive rebuttals on this page.

The bottom line, though, is this. In the UK, according to the World Health Organisation, healthcare spending per capita is around $2000. In the US, it is around $6000 per head. Yet in the UK (again using WHO figures), life expectancy is 79, whereas in the US it is 78. It is not surprising that the WHO ranks Britain's healthcare as 18th in the world, while the US is in 37th place.

But forget the figures for a moment, for healthcare is about humans. Healthcare is perhaps the most complex system any government administers. There can never be a perfect system which satisfies the needs of every patient every time; neither private health insurance nor a national health service are necessarily bad ways of paying for the service. Things do go wrong with the NHS. People get left waiting to see a nurse in a cold hospital corridor. Waiting lists always have room to come down. A patient is lucky if they can find an NHS dentist. Some cancer patients do get denied the most expensive drugs that might prolong their lives - if not cure the cancer - for a few months. Healthcare professionals are invariably overworked.

But the National Health Service has looked after numerous members of my family, providing cancer care, and long term care of chronically ill or disabled relatives, who would not have been able to afford to pay in the American model. If I want to see a doctor because I am worried about a tiny lump on my throat, I could see one this afternoon, and not put off the appointment until next year when I have saved enough. If I am in a car crash, I will receive trauma care that is second to none, and not be turned away at the doors of the nearest casualty department, or of the best department to treat my particular injuries, because my insurance is inadequate. If I have a child who suffers from learning difficulties, he or she will be seen and treated by an occupational therapist (someone like my mother, a paediatric OT), so that they can be integrated into mainstream education where possible. If my grandmother needs things such as grab rails installing in her home, she will be means-tested to see if on her income she qualifies for a grant to help her make the required changes, which allow her to live at home for longer. If I need a prescription, I pay just £7.20 per item, no matter how great the cost to the government. Or if I need a repeat prescription, I can take a prepayment certificate for £104.00 per year. And, for all these benefits, I pay less as a taxpayer than my US counterpart.

The National Health Service is a source of national pride, and I have to say I felt patriotically offended when I read the Guardian this morning. If the Labour government have done one thing well since 1997, it has been to fund the NHS sufficiently such that no future government could ever dream of removing it. It is our institution, and it is here to stay, robust against any abuse and slanders levelled at it from across the Atlantic.

Update Following the post above from this morning, I am delighted to see that I am not the only one who feels positively about the NHS. With thousands of people posting their personal, positive accounts of healthcare in the UK, Twitter posts using #welovetheNHS made it to the top of its trending topics this afternoon. Even the Prime Minister got in on the act.

I've just added a brief review of Seasick, by Alanna Mitchell, to the Essays section of The Pequod. The review was first published in Green World, the quarterly magazine of the UK Green Party.

Read the full review.

On 2nd August, the UK's Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee reported on Students and Universities. Among discussion about access, tuition fees, and the role of further education colleges, the main headline here is about the assurance of the standards of degrees across universities. The committee reports that:

the current system for safeguarding standards is out of date, inconsistent and should be replaced. The Quality Assurance Agency should be transformed into an independent Quality and Standards Agency with a specific standards remit.

The Committee also says that the culture at the top of the sector should change. The Committee found defensive complacency in the leadership of the sector and no appetite to explore key issues such as the reasons for the proportional increase in first and upper second class honours degrees in the past 15 years.

It is unacceptable to the Committee that Vice-Chancellors could not give a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether first class honours degrees achieved at different universities indicate the same or different intellectual standards.

This has been a perennial problem. How do universities retain their independence to teach innovative, distinctive courses, whilst ensuring that a student at one university has to work just as hard to achieve the same degree result as a student from another?

It is clearly important for employers to know that candidates are graduating with equivalent degrees. An employer needs to compare individuals on a like-for-like basis, whereas the system as it stands might allow a candidate from a university that is generous in awarding results to attain a 2:1 when at a different institution he or she might have been awarded a 2:2. Alternatively, given that employers cannot know the demands of every course at every university, although one hopes the old boy's club has long since closed for business, it might be tempting for an employer to perceive a candidate with a lesser degree from a well-known, red-brick university as being better than a candidate with a higher degree from a comparatively anonymous former polytechnic.

As things stand, without national standards across universities, it is ironic that whilst universities - quite legitimately - complain about grade inflation at A-level which makes it impossible to distinguish between applicants all predicted top marks, degree inflation is rife at universities themselves. One of the key markers on league tables is employability, and one of the key determinants of employability is the quality of degree a jobseeker leaves with. It is not surprising, then, that the committee noted that whilst 53% of students achieved a first or 2:1 in 1997, that had risen to 61% by 2008.

Standardisation only exacerbates, rather than alleviating the problem of inflation, however, as I experienced at first hand when I graduated in 2003. Look at the degree results in my subject, English Literature, from my undergraduate institution:

Year	1st	2:1	2:2
2000	12.0	79.5	8.4
2001	15.4	76.9	7.7
2002	13.8	75.5	10.6
2003	23.4	75.8	0.8
2004	22.75	74.68	2.58
2005	20.93	77.33	1.74
2006	27.98	69.72	2.29
2007	25.75	72.91	1.34
2008	33.76	65.4	0.84

Now as an English literature academic mathematics may be my weak point, but something clearly happened in 2003, the year I graduated. I remember that nervous day when we gathered around to look at the results on the board, and were stunned to see a quarter of the results from the class of 2003 were Firsts. Certainly it took something of the shine off my own (and, indeed, with hindsight, I am not at all sure I merited one). Suddenly, compared to previous years, an additional ten percent of us were now getting Firsts who could have been expected to get 2:1s in previous years.

It is certainly not that our exams were easier than those sat by previous years, and unlikely that our class (or those subsequently) suddenly became better at reading books. Unlike A-Levels, where exams have undoubtedly become less rigorous, exams in English at universities tend to ask certain questions about certain texts and authors, and to keep asking them in the same way year after year. If something had happened to our year in 2003, it was stemming from statisticians, not literature students or academics.

I have since gathered that the reason for this effect was standardisation. It was reasoned that since my university department demanded its entrants have 3 As at A-Level, and since university degrees are supposedly of the same standard across institutions, there should be more, better quality candidates emerging with the really top degrees than at institutions taking in a lower calibre of student from A-Level. As computer programmers say: garbage-in, garbage-out.

The risk with the standardisation of degrees across different universities, though, is that it denigrates the effect universities can have in changing the ambitions and skills of their students. Ideally, universities are democratic places, where students are accepted based on their intellectual qualities rather than their social or economic backgrounds, and which subsequently promote bright graduates into higher paid jobs, whatever their class of birth. This is why, as New Labour has failed to decrease child poverty or the gap between rich and poor, they have turned to universities as the engines of egalitarianism. However, since the system is currently biased such that students from private schools go to the best universities (because, in a broken A-Level system, students cannot be compared on intellectual merit), standardisation ensures that this effect will be exacerbated later, as those same privileged students are more likely to emerge with the top degrees.

However, to translate across an argument made in relation to university entrance criteria, it may be that a student with worse A-level results, going to a weaker university, has to work harder to attain a 2:1 than a student at a better university. For example, the top universities might well have more individual tuition, better library facilities, increased levels of pastoral and financial support. The student who has struggled through a university with none of these things may have to try harder than a student who breezes through on the back of them. Universities are not just about the gaining of knowledge for specific workplaces. A university course in biochemistry or English is a horribly inefficient way of enabling a student to enter a graduate programme with a bank or consultancy, as many do. But graduate employers know that universities matter primarily not for the pure knowledge they transmit, but for the techniques and transferable skills students acquire in its pursuit: how to evaluate and acquire different sources of information, how to work independently, how to juggle work and life, how to evaluate problems and pioneer solutions. A student who has attained a degree from a university which offers minimal contact hours, or has a limited library, may well acquire as many of these skills as a student from a well resourced institution. Saying that the former should be more likely to get a worse degree than the latter simply because they are entering with lesser qualifications diminishes the valuable work all universities do by nature, changing the capacities of the students who pass through them.

It is entirely understandable that employers need some simple measure by which to evaluate a student's rounded abilities, to allow them to understand how a university's standing might have affected the sort of education they have received. Is a student with a 2:1 from an established university really better than a student with a 2:1 from a less well-known one? Is a student with a First from my university really among an elite few nationally, or have they been awarded that top class on the back of the university's national ranking? The answer to these questions is not simply to boost the degree classes of those at the top who take the brightest students, and to cut those at the bottom. The degree classification system, with its narrow banding, is simply not fit for this purpose, for if the logic of standardisation continues on its trend since I graduated, within 50 years we would expect all students at my university to get Firsts, and presumably all students somewhere else to get Thirds. The government's plans to change the degree system as recommended by the Burgess Report, though iconoclastic to an ancient system, cannot come soon enough.

At a course level, too, standardisation becomes an impossible beast with which to wrestle. Is it more or less challenging, for example, for a literature student to specialise in modules in contemporary fiction than in the Romantic poets? Does a student who studies poetry (poetry being an endangered species at some universities) undertake an easier literature degree than a student who wrestles with longer novels (which seem in some departments to be the sole literary genre)? Is a university that only offers modules in literature requiring its students to carry out a more rigorous course than universities that allow students to think also about film adaptations of literary texts?

I do not think there can or should be any definitive answers to these comparisons. The risk of degree standardisation is that courses too may become uniform across the sector, preventing a student from participating in a culture of research that is reflected in the unique modules taught by enthusiastic lecturers. Universities exist not just to give students a degree at the end, but to allow students to immerse themselves in a subject - or elements of a subject - that they enjoy for an extended period of time, taking with them the intellectual grounding that lasts a lifetime. Even if we could quantitatively measure whether studying the novel was "harder" than studying poetry, or if one university demands more of its students than another, degree results ought to indicate the quality of a student, not a university. A student, at any university, should only attain a First if they have fully engaged with their subject, regardless of how that university or student's entrance qualifications stands compared to others. There are no such things as standard students. There ought not to be such things as standardised degrees.