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.

The IBAC assigned Howard Payne University a hood lining of this type no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period that described the university’s hood as “navy blue above old gold” without specifying how the two colors were divided.

Perplexing problems bedeviled subsequent IBAC descriptions of Howard Payne’s hood lining. A 1948 IBAC list simplified the description of the university’s “old gold” to (plain) “gold”, which was a common (and confusing) problem with the Bureau’s lists by this point in time. More seriously, the IBAC mistakenly cited Howard Payne’s hood lining as “navy blue and gold”, which was how the Bureau described hood linings with their two colors divided vertically, per pale. Finally, a 1972 IBAC list described the university’s hood lining as navy blue with a gold chevron, which was too similar in appearance to the dark blue with gold chevron lining the IBAC had assigned Simmons College in Massachusetts between 1906 and 1912.