I have heard that if you had little research experience before joining the program, then profs will actually judge how promising you are by how well you fare in the PhD classes. And this in turn will determine the kind of opportunities they will hand to you or the way your advisor will treat you, which really affects the quality of your research output and thus your future placement. How true is that? Do the grades of your PhD students affect your expectations of them and whom you will more likely want to work with?
Do PhD grades matter? To what extent?
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It probably depends on the professor, but when I was in grad school, my advisors agreed to work with me based on what they thought about my research ideas, not my grades.
I actually didn't do that well in my advisor's class (I did okay, I guess--good, but not great), but he took me on anyways because he thought I had a cool dissertation proposal.