The University of California is violating state civil rights laws by requiring applicants to take the SAT or ACT, standardized tests that unlawfully discriminate against disabled, low-income, multilingual and underrepresented minority students, two lawsuits filed Tuesday allege.

The lawsuits, filed on behalf of the Compton Unified School District, four students and six community organizations, demand that the 10-campus UC system eliminate the testing requirement. Any decision by UC to drop the tests — as some prominent UC officials themselves have urged — would play an outsized role in the future of standardized testing in the nation because of the size and status of the premier public research university system.