The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the fear of receiving negative criticism and taking academic risk through canonical correlation analysis-in which a relational model was used. The participants of the study consisted of 215 university students enrolled in various programs at Dicle University's Ziya Gökalp Faculty of Education during the 2011-2012 spring semester. Of the total 215 participants, 122 were female and 93 were male. The Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale and the Academic Risk Taking Scale were used as data collection tools. In order to properly analyze this relationship, the data set fear of receiving negative criticism was divided into straight forward items and reverse scored item variables whereas the data set academic risk-taking was into a multitude of variables; including, (a) the tendency to manifest negativity after experiencing failure, (b) the tendency to prefer difficult actions, (c) recovery after failure and the tendency to become active again, and (d) the tendency to skip homework. The results of the canonical correlation analysis revealed that significant relationships existed between the fear of receiving negative criticism and academic risk taking behavior. The common variance shared between the two has been calculated at 35%.