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 IBAC president Gardner Cotrell Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors. Possibly by 1918 (and certainly by 1927), one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC occasionally used was the “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of between three and four inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.

To avoid duplicating the hood already assigned to Boston University, the Intercollegiate Bureau assigned the University of Puerto Rico a hood lining that was scarlet with a white “reversed chevron” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. A 1948 IBAC list described the chevron as “inverted”. The Bureau may have mistakenly reassigned Puerto Rico a standard chevron in the late 1940s or 1950s, because a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as scarlet with a white (standard) chevron, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1969. Correcting this error, a 1972 IBAC list reverted to the original Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume hood lining assignment with a reversed chevron.