Modelling Admission Exercise in the Joseph Sarwuan Tarka University Makurdi using Discriminant Analysis

Candidates intending to gain admission into the university go through vigorous processes which include, passing Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination, passing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and passing the University of Choices screening test which is post-UTME. Despite all these processes, many candidates who met the requirements do not gain admission into the university while some of the candidates admitted may not be on merit. The study was carried out on secondary data of UTME scores of candidates who apply for admission in the College of Science for 2011/2012 session at Joseph Sarwuan Tarka University, with the aim of using discriminant function to discriminate between those “admitted” and those “not admitted” in the college. The data collected were analysed using average scores, Hotelling’s T2 distribution and discriminant function. The results shows that the average scores of those candidates admitted is higher compared to the average score of those not admitted. The hotelling’s T2 distribution used showed that the population mean vectors of the two groups are significantly different since T^2=62.691 >T_0.05,2,718^2=6.034. This shows that 63.5% of the candidates were correctly classified and 36.5% of the candidates were misclassified. We recommend that discriminant analysis should be used in admission exercise for university candidates and that merit should not be sacrificed on the altar of catchment areas and educationally less-developed states, if that must be in consideration in the admission requirements, those with merit in those states should be prioritized