A federal judge has ruled that the University of California did not discriminate against Christian high schools and their students in deciding that some of their courses failed to meet its academic requirements for college applicants.

A school in Southern California, an association of Christian schools, and several students had sued the university in 2005, arguing that its refusal to honor the courses had violated their rights to freedom of speech and religion. The judge in the case, S. James Otero of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, rejected some of their arguments last March, when he ruled that the university’s policy for evaluating high-school courses was not unconstitutional on its face. But he allowed the plaintiffs to continue pressing claims that applications of the policy in decisions regarding specific courses had violated their rights.

In his latest ruling, issued Friday, Judge Otero rejected a number of the plaintiffs’ motions on procedural grounds, then evaluated the schools’ and the university’s arguments regarding decisions on five courses, in biology, English, government, history, and world religions. In each case, the judge found that the university’s decisions had been based on rational considerations and had showed no animus toward the plaintiffs.

In a written statement, Wyatt R. Hume, the university’s provost and executive vice president for academic and health affairs, praised the judge’s ruling. “As we have said all along,” he said, “the question the university addresses in reviewing courses is not whether they have religious content, but whether they provide adequate instruction in the subject matter.”

Robert Tyler, a lawyer representing the schools, told the Associated Press that he had already appealed Judge Otero’s latest decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. —Charles Huckabee