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 Intercollegiate Bureau 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 Bureau intended to describe.

Idaho State University did not appear in early IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948, so the Bureau probably did not assign the college a hood lining until the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as orange with a black chevron, which must be erroneous as it duplicated the hood lining already assigned to Princeton University in 1895. An IBAC list from 1972 avoided this problem by describing Idaho State’s hood as “black over orange”. Since Lewis & Clark College had been assigned a division of these colors per chevron, and Tusculum College might have been assigned a division of these colors per reversed chevron, here Idaho State has been assigned a division of these colors per bar.