Special Snowflake Syndrome in graduate students

Found an interesting blog post on the prevalence of "Special Snowflake Syndrome" in grad students. Seeing as you work with them, I'm interested in hearing any thoughts you have on this.

Just today an undergraduate was quoted in the press as saying: "If lectures are attended and work handed in, it is difficult to get less than 50% and marks in the high 80s and 90s are attainable. We only need facts, our opinions, interpretations and views do not matter. Hence we cannot be penalised for them." Students are getting to be a very strange bunch indeed, IMHO.

But, as for them not thinking that statistics will apply to them, well, people generally think like that anyway. No one thinks statistical likelihood works as a prior predictor and that's why humans are piss-poor judges of confidence and probability - so I don't think this is special to students, grad or undergrad. Yet, I don't think this attitude (in most cases) is that damaging. As the cliche goes, you make your own luck. If you just go ahead thinking "I have a 50% probability of this and a 25% probability of that" then you'll never get the best result for yourself.

"Consider three central features of SSS: optimism bias, confirmation bias, and causal bias." Isn't that what rugged individualism, the Protestant work ethic, and the American are dream made of?

Totally not unique to any specific group of homo sapiens to the best of my knowledge. E0ven Especially the ones who are supposed to know better.