Preparing for exams in higher education can be challenging, and students often need help to assess their skills and competencies. This paper presents a self-assessment tool to improve students’ exam preparation and performance. The study involved collecting data from students before and after using the tool, which asked questions related to exam preparation strategies such as understanding the exam format, imagining potential test questions, and following directions carefully. The results were compared to assess the tool's effectiveness in improving students' exam skills. The findings showed a significant improvement in the student’s self-assessment and exam performance after using the tool. This paper provides an overview and comparison of existing e-learning management systems and self-assessment tools to highlight the unique features of the proposed tool. The self-assessment tool was designed and tested, with a pre-feedback and post-feedback evaluation of students' skills. Comparing pre and post results showed a statistically significant improvement in students' skills, leading to a notable shift in the percentage of responses. The "never" category experienced a considerable decrease of 27.91%, while the "always" category witnessed a substantial increase of 53.46%. These findings underscore the positive impact of the self-assessment tool on students' behaviors and attitudes toward exam preparation. Overall, this study showcases how self-assessment tools can effectively improve test readiness and outcomes in higher education.

Detecting semantic similarity between documents is vital in natural language processing applications. One widely used method for measuring the semantic similarity of text documents is embedding, which involves converting texts into numerical vectors using various NLP methods. This paper presents a comparative analysis of four embedding methods for detecting semantic similarity in theses and dissertations , namely Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency, Document to Vector, Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers with cosine similarity. The study used two datasets consisting of 27 documents from Duhok Polytechnic University and 100 documents from ProQuest.com. The texts from these documents were pre-processed to make them suitable for semantic similarity analysis. The evaluation of the methods was based on several metrics, including accuracy, precision, Recall, F1 score, and processing time. The results showed that the traditional method, TF-IDF, outperformed modern methods in embedding and detecting actual semantic similarity between documents, with processing time not exceeding a few seconds.

Websites developed for an organisation, especially a university, always need maintenance and improvements to increase user satisfaction and to provide an environment that provides up-to-date information and services in efficient ways. Unfortunately, academic websites are often designed depended on the structure and objectives of an organisation, rather than on whether students, lecturers, and administrative staff find the website usable. This leaves the website users’ needs and expectations unsatisfied. The University of Zakho (UoZ), a public university in the Kurdistan Regional Government, is developing its website to include most of the information required. However, the usability of this website still needs to be checked to know whether or not it satisfies users. This study employs a user-based method to get the rate of usability satisfaction from the perspective of students and academic staff, and it investigates whether the occupation has significant impacts on usability satisfaction. This method is achieved by using a Website Analysis and Measurement Inventory (WAMMI) questionnaire, which is including five factors: attractiveness, controllability, helpfulness, efficiency, and learnability. The study offers recommendations and suggestions to the UoZ web developers for improving the website during the maintenance period. Further, this study proposes ways to enhance the academic websites usability.