A federal appeals court on Friday dismissed a challenge by groups representing coaches, athletes, and alumni of collegiate wrestling programs to federal rules on gender equity in college sports.

The court ruled that the groups had failed to prove that colleges had eliminated or reduced their athletics programs for men because of an Education Department policy, put in place in 1979 and clarified in 1996, that set forth how the department planned to enforce Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law barring gender discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds.

The 1979 policy created a three-part test for determining if a college's athletics programs comply with Title IX. Under the test, a college complies with Title IX if it has the same proportion of female athletes as the student body, has a history of expanding women's athletics programs, or fully accommodates the "interests and abilities" of female students.

The lawsuit was brought by the National Wrestling Coaches Association, the Committee to Save Bucknell Wrestling, the Marquette Wrestling Club, the Yale Wrestling Association, and the National Coalition for Athletics Equity, which later was replaced as a plaintiff by the College Sports Council. The groups charged that the Education Department was "effectively mandating the very discrimination that Title IX prohibits, all in order to meet a regulatory test that Congress did not authorize."

A federal district judge dismissed the suit last June, finding that the groups did not have legal standing to sue. That ruling was upheld on Friday by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit here. The appellate judges split, 2-to-1, in their decision.

The athletics groups had no standing to sue because they offered "nothing but speculation" that overturning the Education Department's rules "would result in schools altering their independent choices regarding the restoration or preservation of men's wrestling programs," Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote in the majority opinion. Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson joined him in upholding the lower court's decision, while Senior Judge Stephen Williams voted to allow the lawsuit to proceed.

The majority opinion states that the athletics groups could sue individual colleges over their handling of men's athletics programs, and that the availability of such a legal route makes the federal government immune from the suit.

In his dissent from the ruling, Judge Williams wrote that the wrestling groups did not have to allege that the Education Department's policies were the sole cause of a decline in men's wrestling programs. Rather, the groups' charge that the three-part test was a "substantial factor" was sufficient to allow the suit to proceed, he said.

Suing individual colleges would not achieve the wrestling groups' aim of overturning the Education Department's allegedly illegal three-part test, he wrote.

Spokesmen for the Education Department could not immediately be reached for comment.

Lawrence J. Joseph, the lawyer for the wrestling groups, said they would appeal the decision to all 11 judges of the appeals court, and beyond that to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.

He pointed to the majority's rejection of another of the arguments by the wrestling groups: that the three-part test creates an "uneven playing field" for male and female athletes. In its recent decisions on affirmative action in admissions at the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court held that unequal treatment of students was sufficient grounds for striking down the affirmative-action policies, Mr. Joseph said.

The groups already have filed a second lawsuit over the three-part test that is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where the original suit also was filed.

Mr. Joseph said that he believes that the judges' mandate that the athletics groups must prove the influence of the three-part test on men's athletics programs will be "an easy hurdle to surmount."

"Everyone knows that in academia," he said.