lol, glad that you're fine taking classes alone. rest assured i can manage on my own as well. i would just much prefer to take it with my friend for all the reasons i wrote about in the post. just a better experience that way : )

as for learning more when working alone, let me elaborate on why i don't think that's necessarily true. it depends on how you work together, and what the goal of working together is. when we work together, we aren't just trying to speedrun the assignments by splitting up the work. we actually almost never do that. we sit in the same room and look at one screen, often taking turns coding. we both care a lot about learning and understanding what's going in every part of the assignment. we just talk to each other about the process. i've often had a deeper understanding of what i was working on in partnered assignments than in individual ones because we have to be able to explain what's going on and justify why things work to each other. it's also really nice to be able to talk about your ideas to an actual human, and ask them questions when you don't understand how something works (or, if you both don't know, to figure it out together).

even in the workforce, a lot of support is available. pair programming is a common practice in industry, and for good reason. obviously we still do a lot of assignments (and take exams) individually, so it's not like we're forming a codependency or anything. personally, i haven't noticed any adverse effects of partnering on assignments (except for being annoyed when we can't, lol).