I wish they'd find a way for "Sweet Pickles" to make a 21st Century comeback!

My guess is that it depends on the individual school. I will say this: my high school Chemistry teacher was a complete psychopath, but one of the few things I actually admired about him was how he selected/assigned our chemistry lab partners for us. He would tell us, preemptively, how, every year his students begged him to allow them to pick their own partners for lab, but his philosophy was: "You don't get to pick who you work with when you're employed in real-life; so why should that be any different in high school?"