The purpose of this paper is to solve the irrationality and redundancy in establishing the land assessment index system.Exemplifying through an empirical study on assessing the potential of the rural residential areas readjustment in Qilihe District of Lanzhou City, the paper polished the indices system based on the attribute simplification principle in the rough set theory and compared the selected indices with the retained indices by correlation test.The results indicate: (1)the attribute core retained by the attribute reduction method included five indices, i.e., rural residential area per capita(X1), idle residential construction land area per capita(X4), GDP per capita (X6), urbanization rate(X9) and public support degree(X10); (2)through correlation test all indices of attribute reduction and the index of used land area per capita(X5) were retained; (3)the attribute reduction method can recognize the unrelated indices, and the retained indices by the method are found to be included in other index sets retained by other methods,e.g., the correlation test method.It indicates that the indices retained by attribute reduction method are simple and effective.It is concluded that the attribute reduction is a new approach for land assessment.