The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “parti per chevron” was also used quite frequently. Here the two school colors were placed in the hood lining one above the other, with the division between them following the shape of a chevron. Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods 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, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the IBAC intended to describe. Other hoods were described as “[color] and [color]” which seems to have indicated a hood lined with colors divided per pale (vertically).

Although Cedarville defined its colors as orange and blue, the fabric samples the college sent to the IBAC must have been orange and dark blue, so to avoid duplicating the hood linings already assigned to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (orange with a navy blue chevron) or the University of Virginia (navy blue with an orange chevron), by 1927 the IBAC had assigned an “orange above dark blue” hood lining to Cedarville, but also an “orange above navy blue” hood lining to two other colleges: Hope College and Morgan College. Although different on paper, these three hood linings would have been indistinguishable in practice.

Probably to resolve this problem, the IBAC revised the pattern and color shades of Cedarville’s hood in a 1948 list, citing it as “orange and blue”, which was typically how the IBAC described hood colors divided per pale (vertically, left and right). But by 1972 the IBAC had reverted to an “orange over blue” pattern (while keeping the revised colors from 1948).