The tensile strength of rock materials is a parameter relevant to many rock mechanics applications. Rocks are often anisotropic in nature. Therefore, it is of interest to investigate suitable experimental methods for tensile testing to be used with these rocks. An attempt is made in this paper to see if the indirect methods adopted for testing isotropic rocks can be applied. Two rock types with transversely isotropic behavior are tested by loading discs and rings along their diameter. The finite element method is used in order to correlate the tensile stress, for which tensile failure is assumed to occur in each test, with the orientation of the axes of anisotropy. It is shown that the experimental results can be appropriately explained by this method and a parameter be defined which allows one to describe the law of variation of tensile strength with the anisotropy of deformability.