Students’ placement into courses of study in most (if not all) tertiary
institutions in Nigeria had long been a problematic exercise. Most
students get placed into courses of study they are ill suited to and then
for which they are ill prepared. This research work titled “Multivariate
Modeling of Student Placement in Nigeria Higher Institutions in
University of Maiduguri: An Application of Fisher’s Linear
Discriminant Analysis”. Focused on the Statistical Analysis of
classifying students into various department based on their scores on
Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). The study only
covered the Department of Chemistry and Department of Biological
science, Faculty of Science, University of Maiduguri. Discriminant
Analysis technique was used and results obtained indicated that many
students were wrongly admitted in to both Departments (Department
of Chemistry and Department of Biological Science). 45% of students
were wrongly admitted into Chemistry Department and 41% were also
wrongly admitted into Biological Science Department based on the
Apparent Error Rate (APER) calculated. Based on the result; it is
however recommended that proper statistical measures (statistical
application) should be introduced into the admission system of various
higher institutions so as to minimized the problems highlighted.