The best of survey technology meets the best of UK HE-trained AI.
evasys and Student Voice AI have been commissioned by Advance HE to deliver thematic coding of selected open comments from the 2025 Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) and Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES), delivered through interactive dashboards.
These two surveys enable institutions across the UK sector and in several other countries to gather information to help maximise the quality of their provision at postgraduate research and postgraduate taught levels. Advance HE works with over 100 institutions on each survey, with universities taking a specific decision to participate and increase understanding on postgraduate offerings, hear the student voice and provide benchmarking comparisons to measure improvement against.
The appointment follows the exciting partnership announcement between evasys – the UK’s leading survey and insights platform – and Student Voice AI, the first and only machine learning model-based text analysis solution trained exclusively on UK higher education data. Together, they bring sector-specific insight, cutting-edge AI and intuitive data visualisation to help institutions truly understand and act on the student voice.
Bruce Johnson, Managing Director of evasys ltd, commented: “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."
What makes this analysis different – and better
Unlike other providers, Student Voice AI – a university spin out led by an academic who still lectures part-time - is purpose-built for UK higher education. Every comment and sentence it analyses is interpreted in context, thanks to three years of training on over 100 institutions’ survey responses to PTES and PRES, and training on NSS and a wide range of internal surveys including module evaluation, student experience and welcome surveys from institutions such as UCL, Queen’s Belfast, Edinburgh and Exeter.
Each student’s comment is broken down into sentences and allocated to one or more nuanced categories – 44 taught experience categories and 26 research experience categories – aggregated into 9 top level themes. This ensures institutions get clarity, not just commentary. Emerging themes are continually added and data sets can be rerun, increasing long-term value and insight.
Differing from other AI providers, Student Voice AI categorises all valid comments submitted.
The evasys platform takes that insight even further. Institutions can access the analysis within their existing customer dashboards or via a dedicated dashboard. Either way, institutions will gain access to:
- Theme distribution
- Sentence-level categorisation
- Advanced sentiment analysis by comment and by sentence
- Demographic and discipline breakdowns
- Sector benchmark comparisons via separate outputs from Student Voice AI
For customers, data can also be fed into institutional data marts and/or accessed by business intelligence tools, enabling strategic planning beyond the survey cycle.
Jonathan Neves, Head of Business Intelligence and Surveys, Advance HE commented:
"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.”
Available at no additional cost for all institutions participating in PTES and/or PRES
This enhanced analysis service is being offered by Advance HE on an opt-in basis, and at no additional cost to participating institutions. Whether universities are evasys customers or not, they can benefit from deep, high-quality insights, presented in a clear, accessible format.
evasys customers can choose to surface the PTES/PRES analysis in their existing dashboard or can enjoy a standalone instance in the same way that non-evasys customers will access their data.
The comments analysed will be those in response to the final open questions in the main section of PRES/PTES:
- “What has been the one most positive aspect of your course/research degree programme so far?”
- “What one thing would most improve your experience of your course/research degree programme?”
These comments are processed using a multi-dimensional AI model, dissecting every sentence into relevant categories, themes and sentiments – enabling institutions to see not just what students are saying, but what they mean.
Returning stronger: sector-built, sector-led
While this is the first year the evasys/Student Voice AI partnership will deliver the project, Student Voice AI has a proven track record, having provided the machine-learning analysis for PRES and PTES open comments for three consecutive years prior to 2024. Now, with evasys on board, the analysis offering is significantly enhanced, offering institutions a smarter, deeper and more actionable experience than ever before.
Both technologies are very much by the sector, for the sector, with decades’ worth of experience working with higher education across both teams.
Dr Stuart Grey, CEO of Student Voice AI, said: “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."
