Abstract: Mining of gold from sand and rocks is referred to as gold mining rather than sand or rock mining. Thus data mining is nothing but the ‘knowledge mining’ from the data. Data mining techniques extract knowledge from large amount of data about a system. This knowledge can be used for taking various strategic decisions as well as finding the solutions towards the betterment of the system. The education system of a nation influences progressive nation building. It plays a vital role in the personal growth of a student and the social development among all. In this paper we have discussed various data mining techniques which can be used to improve the academic performance of the students. The main objective of higher education institutions is to provide quality education to their students. With the help of some data mining techniques like Association Rules, Classification, and KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Database), the institutes can evaluate the student performance and overcome the problems of low grades. The data required for this evaluation is hidden in huge educational databases. Data mining techniques not only abstract this data but also make predictions about student’s performance and suggest remedies depending upon the performance.