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 may have employed (although this is not certain) 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.

Shepherd College became became a four year institution in 1930 and began conferring the Bachelor of Arts degree at that time. The Bachelor of Science degree followed in 1950. The IBAC probably assigned the college a hood lining pattern at this point because Shepherd did not appear in early Intercollegiate Bureau lists from 1927 or 1948. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described the college’s hood lining as blue above gold, with the two colors divided per chevron. Sheard may have erroneously interchanged the two colors of Shepherd University’s hood in his description, because this pattern would have been too similar to hood linings the Bureau had already assigned to Rollins College in Florida and possibly the Oklahoma School of Mines prior to 1927. Shepherd’s correct color arrangement can be found in an IBAC list from 1972 which stated that the university’s hood was “gold over marine blue”. The Bureau’s descriptions typically (and frustratingly) omitted the heraldic division between the colors but in this case that information can be gleaned from Sheard’s citation.

Another school in the same state, West Virginia University, has nearly the same hood lining design: old gold over dark blue, divided per chevron.