Thesis preparation is one of the academic requirements that often causes psychological preassure among university students. One of the internal factor presumed to contribute to academic stress is fear of failure, which refers to an
individual’s fear of failure and its assosiated negative consequences. This study aimed to examine the effect of fear of falire on academic stress among students from the 2020 & 2021 cohorts who were completing their undergraduate thesis at University Muhammadiyah Jember. This study employed a quantitative approach with casual research design. A total of 148 students were selected using snowball sampling technique. The instruments used were the Performance Failure
Appraisal Inventory (PFAI) to measure fear of failure, with a reliability cooefficient of 0,960 and the academic stress scale based on Gadzella and Masten’s theory, with a reability coefficient of 0,936. Data were analyzed using
simple linear regression analysis. The result indicated a significant positive effect of fear of failure on academic stress ( p = 0,00 < 0,05, F = 289,498). Therefore H1
was accepted, indicating that fear of failure significantly predicts academic stress.The coefficient of determination (R² = 0.665) indicated that fear of failure accounted for 66.5% of the variance in academic stress. These findings indicate that higher levels of fear of failure are associated with higher levels of academic stress during the thesis-writing process. The findings of this study imply that fear of failure contributes to difficulties in completing an undergraduate thesis. Therefore, higher education institutions are expected to develop academic and
psychological support programs that focus on enhancing students' selfconfidence, resilience in dealing with failure, and adaptive coping strategies,thereby enabling students to better manage the challenges encountered during the thesis-writing process