Student Voice AI teams up with evasys and Advance HE to deliver machine-learning analysis for PTES & PRES 2025 open comments

By Student Voice AI

Student Voice AI is delighted to confirm that Advance HE has commissioned our UK-trained machine-learning service—delivered in partnership with evasys—to provide thematic coding and interactive dashboards for selected open-text comments in the 2025 Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) and Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES).

These flagship sector surveys gather vital feedback on postgraduate teaching and research in more than 100 institutions across the UK and internationally. By combining our sector-specific AI with the evasys survey and insights platform, universities will receive deeper, faster and more actionable understanding of what their taught and research postgraduates are really saying.

“We’re delighted to deliver this project for Advance HE with such a strong partnership in place. Our collaboration with Student Voice AI brings together deep sector knowledge, cutting-edge AI and the leading survey platform in UK higher education to deliver nuanced, actionable insights from open comments in these two key sector surveys.”
Bruce Johnson, Managing Director, evasys

What makes our analysis different – and better

Because Student Voice AI is purpose-built for UK higher education, every sentence we analyse is interpreted in context. Our model has already spent three years learning from more than 100 institutions’ PTES, PRES, NSS and internal surveys, enabling us to classify each free-text sentence into 44 taught-experience and 26 research-experience sub-categories, rolled up into nine top-level themes. Emerging topics are continually added and historical data can be rerun, ensuring institutions always see the full, current picture.

Where many generic AI tools ignore shorter or ‘difficult’ answers, we categorise every valid student comment. Our fine-grained approach tells institutions not just what students say, but what they mean.

Rich insight where you already work

Through evasys, participating universities can view PTES/PRES insights inside their existing customer dashboards or via a dedicated standalone dashboard—even if they are not yet evasys customers. Key features include:

  • Theme distribution visualisations
  • Sentence-level categorisation
  • Advanced sentiment analysis at both comment and sentence level
  • Demographic and discipline breakdowns
  • Sector benchmarks generated by Student Voice AI
  • Optional data feeds into institutional data marts or BI tools for strategic planning

Institutions opting in will see analysis of the two open questions:

  1. “What has been the one most positive aspect of your course/research degree programme so far?”
  2. “What one thing would most improve your experience of your course/research degree programme?”

Each response is dissected by our multi-dimensional AI model, revealing the categories, themes and sentiments that matter most.

“We’re excited to partner with evasys and Student Voice to offer our member institutions a comprehensive service that analyses open comments alongside the detailed benchmarking reports that we already provide.
We are pleased to offer this service free of charge to institutions participating in PTES and PRES this year.

The partnership combines the evasys survey platform with Student Voice AI’s machine learning tool for analysing open-text comments. Their solution is customised, transparent and genuinely focused on improving the student experience. We’re particularly impressed by how they present the data visually and look forward to seeing results from using these specialised tools in tandem.”
Jonathan Neves, Head of Business Intelligence and Surveys, Advance HE

Available free of charge in 2025

Advance HE will make this enhanced analysis available at no additional cost to every institution participating in PTES and/or PRES 2025. Existing evasys customers can toggle the insight directly into their normal dashboards, while new institutions will receive a secure standalone view.

Returning stronger: sector-built, sector-led

Student Voice AI has successfully delivered machine-learning analysis for PTES and PRES open comments for the three years (2021, 2022 and 2023). Now, with evasys on board, the 2025 service is smarter, deeper and more actionable than ever—created by the sector for the sector.

“It’s great to be working with AdvanceHE again – and even more exciting to be doing it in partnership with evasys. Bringing our AI machine-learning model – trained exclusively on UK higher education data – together with the leading survey and insights platform in the sector will be so beneficial for participating institutions. The combined UK higher education knowledge of evasys and Student Voice AI provides a real edge in terms of understanding all the nuances of student feedback and how it can be used to make real improvements.”
Dr Stuart Grey, CEO of Student Voice AI

For further information or to opt in to the 2025 PTES/PRES open-comment analysis, please contact Advance HE or get in touch with the Student Voice AI team at [email protected].

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