Abstract
This paper illustrates how to use data mining techniques to help in advising students and predicting their academic performance. Data mining is used to get previously unknown, hidden and perhaps vital knowledge from a large amount of data. It combines domain knowledge, advanced analytical skills, and a vast knowledge base to reveal hidden patterns and trends that are applicable in virtually any sector ranging from engineering to medicine, to business. However, it is possible for educational institutes to use data mining to find useful information from their databases. This is usually called Educational Data Mining (EDM). Advancing the field of EDM with new data analysis techniques and new machine learning algorithms is vital. Classification and clustering techniques will be used in this project to study and analyse student performance. The key importance of this project is that it discusses different data mining techniques in the literature review to study student behaviour depending upon their performance. We tried to identify the most suitable algorithms from the existing research methods to predict the success of students. Various data mining approaches were discussed and their results were evaluated. In this paper, the J48 algorithm was applied to the data set, gathered from Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah.