To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. In IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hood lining patterns were described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]”, which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar. Unfortunately, today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the Bureau intended to describe.

The IBAC assigned Assumption College a hood lined “white above light blue” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. This was a duplication of the hood lining also assigned to St. Mary’s College in Wisconsin (today Mount Mary University), so Intercollegiate Bureau lists from 1948 and 1972 used Assumption’s new shade of blue to slightly modify the college’s hood description, substituting “blue” for “light blue”. But this, too, duplicated another institution’s hood, that of Westminster College in Pennsylvania (“white over blue”). None of these IBAC citations indicated the heraldic division between the two colors, but a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Assumption’s hood lining as white over dark blue, divided per chevron.

One should note that the shades of blue in these descriptions of Assumption’s hood lining vary from light to dark blue. To avoid duplicating the hoods of Mount Mary University and Westminster College, here Assumption’s hood lining has been redesigned to resemble its coat of arms: blue (upper left and lower right) and white (upper right and lower left), divided per cross.