laconia

I have a TA position wherein my main duty is to grade student papers. They are senior level undergraduates in an art program, currently writing their papers for their capstone design project. I have approximately 35 papers to grade, and so far, almost every single one of them has fairly significant grammatical and structural errors. My issue is that at the beginning of the course the professor said to be "lenient" in my grading, and the lowest they will allow me to grade is a C. Honestly, most of them are C's or worse, in my opinion, but I don't want to go over the professor's head. I'm really annoyed that these kids are getting a pass at having crappy writing. I think this is a big issue for college aged students who will have to eventually go out into the workforce. Why is bad grammar and writing considered acceptable at the college level? I could understand if it was a few students here and there who had difficulty with writing, but this is almost every single student in the class. I am doing my best to correct all of the errors, red-lining the heck out of their papers and making comments, but I am not very hopeful that simply making comments will really teach them. I feel like they need a complete overhaul lesson in writing, but that's way outside the scope of my work (and frankly, abilities - I know how to write, but not so much how to teach).

The program I applied to sent out an email mid-March saying they'd finish up reviewing applications within the next couple weeks and that we should expect to receive admissions decisions around the first week of April. "Around the first week of April" is a little vague to me... could be before that week, could be sometime this week, could be a little after this week. I had a good rapport with one of the professors in the program who very strongly encouraged me to apply.. this professor is also on admissions committee and in a casual back/forth exchange a few weeks ago, they told me I was in the "unofficial" yes pile. If I don't hear back by the end of this week, do you guys think it'd be okay to email admissions to ask for a status update, or should I just wait it out until the 15th?