The impact of College English Test (CET) on graduates´ salaries using data mining techniques

English language proficiency continues to be considered essential for students who want to optimize their employment opportunities after graduation. In China, the College English Test (CET) is one of the most important exams, which measures students´ level of English proficiency. This paper focuses on relations between College English Test results and graduates salaries. This was followed by the identification of the main factors affecting the CET results. The study was based on data collected from the Haojing College of Shaanxi University of Science and Technology in China. In this study, association rules mining and classification and regression tree algorithms were chosen to analyze the data. According to the analysis, the results indicate that CET performance plays a key role in graduate income levels. Finally, some strategies will be recommended in order to enhance the quality of English teaching.