Students' academic records are created from the point of entry into the University up to graduation and even beyond. Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria has over the years generated and accumulated huge amount of students' academic data that are found all over the various departmental offices, deans offices, the Academic Office and the Registry Archives. Valuable as these records are, access to them is time consuming and labourious resulting to lost opportunities for further studies, employments and undue delays in decision making on the part of management. The study was undertaken to investigate how students academic records in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria are organized and retrieved. A descriptive survey research design and purposive sampling procedure were employed for the study to find out the effectiveness of students' records organization and retrieval in the various departmental records offices of the 12 faculties. The number of staff identified as those managing students' records were 480 and the study used Krejcie and Morgan table to determine the sample size which was 216. A total of 216 questionnaires were distributed but 210 were filled and returned which gave a response rate of 97.2%. Data analysis of the bio-data variables were presented in frequencies and percentages. Five research questions as well as four research hypotheses were raised and tested the hypotheses. The reliability of the instruments was tested using the split-half method. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) statistics tested whether relationship exist among the respondents' opinions on the individual items that made up each research hypothesis. The decision to accept or reject any null hypothesis was at 0.05 alpha level of significance. The study revealed that access to students' records in the study area was slow and time consuming due to poor records organization. The study concluded that students' records organization is below standard and so should be allocated good time in processing the student's records to help researchers and administrators experience fruitful search for specific records and timely. The research proposed centralized records system for students' academic records as well as ensuring that staff responsible for management of records are professionals or trained to monitor students' records either in manual or electronic format to ease accessibility. National Universities Commission (NUC) should as a matter of urgency design and implement a policy that will compel all Universities in Nigeria to provide functional records centres that will make students' academic data available to the commission and other relevant organizations at all times.