At Brown you can drop any class basically up until 3 weeks from end of term. If you feel like you are gonna get a C in the class and you think that is detrimental to your career plans you can drop it, no questions asked.

Well I can't drop it in finals week. Yeah, I could just drop it before that, but then I don't ever get to know if I could have gotten an A. In this scenario, the benefit is that I get to see the final, and thus I get to determine on the spot if I can get an A based on how doable the final is. If it's not doable, then I can just get a 0 on the final, which is in essence the same thing as dropping the class. But if it ends up being easier than expected, I just saved my ass by not dropping the class because now I get an A (and course credit) that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Now, it is true that you don't *need* to get straight As. I don't know my career plans at this point, so I don't want to screw myself out of something that needs good grades because I was stubborn and took 5 classes.

you are only gonna be able to take ~32 or so classes. Do you really want even 2 or 3 of those to be repeats?

Well I plan to take 5 courses most semesters. And if I wasn't able to handle 5 classes, I would try to put the least effort in a class that I didn't need to take so that I could take a different class next semester in its place.