Quality assessment of ideological and political education in colleges and universities is an important link to ensure the effectiveness of education. This study constructs the quality assessment model of ideological and political education in colleges and universities based on the improved K-Means clustering algorithm, adopts hierarchical analysis to determine the weights of evaluation indexes, and designs the evaluation system that contains 6 first-level indexes and 23 second-level indexes. The initial clustering center selection method is optimized by density parameters, and weighted Euclidean distance calculation is introduced to reduce the influence of anomalies and improve the clustering effect. The empirical study collects 500 evaluation data of ideological and political education in a university and divides them into three grades of “good”, “medium” and “poor”, accounting for 50.6%, 37.6% and 11.8% respectively. The results show that the first-level index of Civic and Political Education has the highest score (18.34 points, 91.68%), and the score of team building is relatively low (10.57 points, 52.83%), and the overall evaluation is at a good level. Meanwhile, the distribution of students’ performance was highly consistent with the distribution of clustered grades, which verified the validity of the assessment model. The conclusion of the study shows that the improved K-Means clustering algorithm has strong applicability in the assessment of the quality of ideological and political education in colleges and universities, and the results of the assessment can provide data support and improvement direction for ideological and political education in colleges and universities, and promote the accurate improvement of the quality of ideological and political education.
