If you conduct a survey with open questions or receive feedback from your students, you end up with many textual utterances. How do you summarize it? And how do you get a sense of what has been mentioned multiple times?

You can ask ChatGPT to summarize textual feedback and you can also ask for some kind of quantification.

As always be careful with data protection and look for alternative ChatBots if you are dealing with sensitive data.

Prompt

It is always recommended to put your data or context first and then pose your question.

CONTEXT START
[PASTE YOUR SURVEY ANSWERS OR STUDENT FEEDBACK HERE]
CONTEXT END

I’ve received student feedback on my lecture in response to the following question: Praise, criticism, suggestions for improvement regarding the lecture, teaching methods, and script. Summarize the responses:

List the 5 most common positive and 5 most common critical points, sorted by frequency (most frequent first).

For each point, indicate how often it was mentioned in parentheses. Include partial mentions: (2) = clearly mentioned twice, (1.5) = mentioned twice, but the second is only partially fitting, (1.2) = in the second mention, only a minor aspect fits

Use decimal numbers to reflect such nuances.

Be precise in counting and double-check that the grouping is accurate.

At the end, include three particularly positive direct quotes from the feedback.

Here are the original responses:

(PASTE STUDENT FEEDBACK HERE)