I think I had a better understanding than most of what I found to be a very interesting course. However, covering the wide variety of different topics required to describe the entire standard model in one course leaves a lot to just memorizing as much as you can, rather than grasping the underlying concepts. I don't think I was alone in finding it a struggle to piece together a complete answer to any of the questions, which came as quite a shock. Most memory-intensive exams tend to guide you through questions a bit more to build up an answer, piece by piece, which many didn't feel was the case. Stating the time and temperature of Helium synthesis off the top of my head just wasn't going to happen - we assumed we weren't expected to have times/temperatures of various events memorized. I'm glad you've not noticed anything unusual in the marking, and I'm sure the numbers don't lie, but I'm fairly certain and thoroughly disappointed to say I think I'd be lucky to get a 2:1 despite a very successful cosmology project this year. I hope you didn't get too much of a hard time and good luck with next year's class!