<![CDATA[Improving the quality of education has become a primary focus in addressing the increasingly complex challenges of the educational landscape. One promising approach to support data-driven decision-making is the prediction of students' academic performance using machine learning algorithms. This study aims to develop a classification model for predicting students' academic performance by leveraging the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm. The dataset used was obtained from SMPN 1 Gunung Halu and includes both academic and non-academic attributes of students. Five key features were selected: initial grades, midterm grades, final grades, student behavior, and attendance. Data preprocessing involved feature selection, handling missing values, transforming categorical variables using label encoding, and balancing the classes using the SMOTE method. The XGBoost model was then trained using an 80:20 data split and hyperparameter tuning was performed using Grid Search. Evaluation results showed that the model achieved an accuracy of 84% with balanced F1-scores across all classes. The model outperformed other algorithms such as Bagging and Random Forest. With its strong accuracy and stability, the XGBoost model has the potential to serve as a tool for identifying students who require academic intervention. This study makes a significant contribution to the development of AI-based education systems and provides a foundation for the application of machine learning in improving the quality of secondary-level learning.]]>
