The ability to delay gratification among learners could serve as an effective learning strategy useful to diminish the detrimental effect of test anxiety. Academic delay of gratification refers to students' postponement of immediately available opportunities to satisfy impulses in favor of pursuing chosen important academic rewards or goals that are temporally remote but ostensibly more valuable. Using hierarchical regression analysis, this association was explored for 364 students. An association was found between academic delay of gratification and test anxiety once motivational, cognitive, and self-regulated factors are controlled. These findings suggest that academic delay of gratification may serve to enhance students' goal enhancement, which in turn results in high academic achievement. These results also suggest that delay of gratification may function as a learning strategy that buffers the detrimental effect of test anxiety by helping learners protect academic goals from nonacademic alternative strategies. These results also indicate that self-efficacy, regulation of time, and study environment are negative predictors of test anxiety, while delay of gratification, extrinsic goal orientation, and rehearsal are positive predictors of test anxiety. An appendix contains the Academic Delay of Gratification Scale (H. Bembenutty, 1997). (Contains 1 figure, 7 tables, and 59 references.) (SLD)