<p>
</p>
<p>Like aibarr said above, you don’t get stuck on those spots where you can’t break your thought process and you get stuck in a rut for a few hours. I spent an hour last night trying to do an integral that I thought was really complex (was going to have to do a crazy contour integral with a whole slew of integrals and whatnot) when I finally gave up and decided to go home for the night. On the walk home, I realized that I could do some algebra to turn it into an integral I learned how to do in Calc 1. If I had been with a group, I probably wouldn’t have gotten stuck on that spot, wasted an hour, and gone home earlier than I wanted to.</p>
<p>Also, by making the homework process faster, it lets you spend more time on learning the material more thoroughly. I’ve had a number of classes where I just didn’t have the time I wanted to learn the material, and all I could do was write my homeworks and hope that it all stuck with me.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, that’s something some people fall prey to. If you’re in a good group, though, people won’t just copy verbatim and will still care about learning the thought process behind what you’re doing in the problem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>When all of you are 3.5+ students, you stop caring. What matters a lot more is learning the material, since that’s why you’re taking the class in the first place.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind when you get into the Real World you’re going to be working with teams of people. Sure, you’ll be alone doing some of your work, but for a lot of time you’ll have to be integrating your work with others, so why not start learning how to do that in college?</p>
<p>I actually like the style of one of my classes, where half of the problems assigned are individual and half are collaboration allowed. Makes you think pretty hard about the ones you work on alone, but it allows the professor to making some really f-ing hard problems for the group work.</p>