Will taking a course graded S/U look bad on a transcript?

Graduate School
1

I am currently majoring in psychology at Smith College and I’m looking to apply to clinical psych PhD programs within the year. I have an overall 3.98 GPA, stellar recs, and great research and work experience.

At Smith, I’m trying to get Latin Honors. This means I’ll have to take seven classes in each major field (art, history, foreign language, literature, math, social science, natural science). There is a literature course I’m very interested in, but I’m not a humanities person and the professor is a notoriously hard grader. I worry the class will
destroy my GPA if I take a regular letter grade. However, since Smith offers me the option of satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading, I can take it and just get an S on my transcript that doesn’t impact my GPA. I’ve never taken S/U grading before.

So, my options are:

An “S” on my transcript
Taking another class that I’m not interested in to get an easy A

I’m looking at some pretty competitive/top ranked grad schools. Can anyone tell me what the better option is?

2

I am tempted to answer “don’t sweat it” but maybe a better answer is “what does your advisor say?”