  Students' decisions on whether to take a class are strongly affected by
whether their friends plan to take the class with them. A student may prefer to
be assigned to a course they likes less, just to be with their friends, rather
than taking a more preferred class alone. It has been shown that taking classes
with friends positively affects academic performance. Thus, academic institutes
should prioritize friendship relations when assigning course seats. The
introduction of friendship relations results in several non-trivial changes to
current course allocation methods. This paper explores how course allocation
mechanisms can account for friendships between students and provide a unique,
distributed solution. In particular, we model the problem as an asymmetric
distributed constraint optimization problem and develop a new dedicated
algorithm. Our extensive evaluation includes both simulated data and data
derived from a user study on 177 students' preferences over courses and
friends. The results show that our algorithm obtains high utility for the
students while keeping the solution fair and observing courses' seat capacity
limitations.
