withdraw prior to the deadline. Most employers are probably not ever going to see your transcript, and a grad program would probably not have an issue unless it appeared that you had a pattern of starting classes and then dropping them when things got difficult.

Note that this was what I was told by a family friend when I was at BYU more than 20 years ago — he worked in the BYU admissions office and I called him on the last day you could drop the class with a "W" (after that it became an "Unofficial Withdrawal" which was like failing the class). It made sense to me at the time — still does now — and I dropped the challenging honors class that I was just not understanding.