The Data Analytics team at The University of Waikato gathers student feedback (as rich qualitative data) but manual analysis of these comments poses a time challenge for reporting. To address this, we explored the possibility of condensing qualitative information by leveraging natural language processing (NLP) technology, specifcally Google’s NLP sentiment analysis. We employed a robust coding framework to test the validity of NLP-coded student feedback, analysing 1000 comments from the University’s 2021 course evaluations. Results show a statistical correlation between our sentiment analysis and NLP, ofering promising evidence for NLP’s efcacy in providing accurate, high-level insights into student feedback sentiment.