Implementation of Data Mining for Strategic Issues in Education Sector

Education sector is considered as the boon for the development of any nation. In India this sector is developing much more than any other domestic industry. Inspite of the huge amount of data being stored about the students, the management is not able to make suitable decisions for the students and the education sector is struggling hard to provide quality education and student oriented services to the students. As a result of which we are becoming data rich and information poor. The major problems faced are the ability to discover the suitability of the students for a particular course, the ability to retain them in the course, detection of abnormal behavior of the students, grouping the students of similar skill set into one group, finding the best combination of associated courses for a student, prediction about the performance of the students in a particular course, detection of abnormal values in the result sheets. The panacea for all these ills is to extract the knowledge hidden in the data bases and to use that knowledge extracted for the decision making process. The data mining techniques can prove to be a boon for these problems and this paper explores the use of data mining techniques as a solution for these problems to improve the efficiency of higher education.