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. Later the IBAC began to use a per reversed chevron division and a division per bar on rare occasions. 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.

Georgetown College was cited as having a hood lined “orange above black” in IBAC lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972, but none of these lists described the way the two colors were divided. However, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the college’s hood lining as orange with a black chevron, which must be erroneous because this was a duplication of the hood the IBAC assigned Princeton University in 1895 (which is no doubt why the IBAC originally assigned Georgetown a hood lined “orange above black”).

That said, by the mid 1920s the IBAC was describing the hood linings of two colleges – Georgetown and Oklahoma A&M – as being “orange above black”, which suggests that one of these institutions used a per chevron division of the colors and the other used a per reversed chevron division or a per bar division. As the first of the two colleges to adopt orange and black, and as the older of the two colleges, here Georgetown has been assigned a per chevron division.