Google Classroom will write your rubric now. It still won't grade against it.

Google is putting two things into Classroom right as most of us go back to work. On August 5, rubric generation started appearing inside the assignment creation page, so Gemini can draft a rubric from the assignment you just wrote and hand you the criteria to edit. Gemini in Classroom also opens to students of all ages, August 10 on web and August 17 on mobile.

Google rolled this one out to everybody at once, both Rapid and Scheduled Release domains, if you track that sort of thing. So if your admin has Gemini in Classroom turned on, you probably already have it on your assignment page. It comes on by default, on Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus.

I ran it on a worksheet from my own course the day it landed. It saved me time and it needed a lot of editing.

Then you hit the part the rubric button does not touch. You have a rubric, you have 150 submissions coming, and nothing in Classroom will score one against the other. The rubric is faster to make this month, but grading against it still takes as long as it did in May.

What Google actually shipped

Two separate releases, and they are easy to run together.

Rubric generation in the assignment flow, August 5. When you get to the Rubrics section on a new assignment, Gemini will draft a Classroom-ready rubric from the instructions you just wrote, and you review and edit its criteria before adding them. The same update also lets you convert a rubric file you already have right from that page, which saves a trip to the Gemini tab. Google calls this "streamline grading setup." The setup is the part it helps with.

Gemini in Classroom for all ages, August 10 on web and August 17 on mobile. Depending on when you are reading this it may already be on in your domain. Students of any age whose admin has granted access can use the Gemini tab to turn class materials into flashcards, practice quizzes, and study guides. It covers Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus. Admins control access and can switch it off for under-18 students by moving them into a separate organizational unit.

If you are the person on your campus who gets asked about this, read that second one carefully. It is a study tool for students. It has nothing to do with your gradebook.

What happened when I ran it on my own worksheet

Unit 1 of my mechatronics course opens with a worksheet on the five subsystems, an engineering careers table, two matching exercises, and two real-world robot examples. It says "Total: 100 points" at the top, and every question on it carries its own printed weight. Matching car parts to subsystems is 10 points. Matching sensors to what they detect is 12. The careers table is 24. There is a 3-point bonus at the bottom.

I handed that PDF to the rubric generator. It came back with six criteria, four points each, 24 points total.

One run, one worksheet. These tools do not return the same thing twice, so yours will come back different, and Google's own disclaimer under the output tells you to double-check it. This is one result, not a judgment on the whole feature. It did show me what to check.

The reading was fine. It knew there were five car parts and six sensors. It noticed I had asked students to pull salary numbers from bls.gov and cite them, and it built a criterion around source reliability, which is a fair read of what I wanted.

The scoring is where it fell apart. The point values were already in the file and it used none of them. On my worksheet the careers table is worth 24 and the sensor match is worth 12. On the generated rubric they are both worth 4. A ten-point matching exercise and a twenty-four-point research assignment came back weighted the same. The bonus vanished. Attach that rubric as written and the assignment says 100 points on the page in front of the student and 24 in the gradebook.

Then there is the sixth criterion, "Clarity and Technical Precision of Written Explanations," worth the same four points as everything else. Nothing on that worksheet asks students to write well. It is a fill-in-the-table assignment. That criterion puts a sixth of the grade on prose polish for work I never asked anyone to polish, and its top level reads "perfect clarity for an 11th-grade level," which I would not know how to score the same way twice.

The level descriptions have a similar problem. On the sensor question, Meeting is "correctly matches at least five sensors" and Approaching is "matches most sensors correctly." Five out of six is most. Those two boxes describe the same student.

I kept the rubric and rewrote about half of it, and that still beat starting from an empty table. So I would use it again. Just not the way the button implies, where you generate and attach and move on. Check the point values yourself before you attach it.

The part that did not ship

Neither release scores student submissions. Google's announcements describe generating rubric criteria and generating study material. Neither one describes producing a grade, a point value, or a criterion-by-criterion score for the work your students turn in.

Google has held that line since Gemini first showed up in Classroom. Its feedback assistance for writing assignments stops short of a score, runs one student at a time, and on many campuses you need a paid license to use it at all. I went through what it does and does not do in Can Gemini grade assignments in Google Classroom?, and the August releases did not move that line.

So as of August 2026, Classroom will help you write the rubric and help your students study, and you still score every submission yourself, one at a time, the same as in May.

What to do with the rubric Gemini just wrote for you

ClassLens can read the rubric you attached to a Google Classroom assignment. Most teachers I talk to do not know that.

When you point ClassLens at an assignment, it checks whether that assignment has a rubric in Classroom. If it does, ClassLens pulls the criteria and their point levels straight from Classroom and grades against them criterion by criterion, on the rubric you already approved, in the same wording your students can see. The per-criterion scores come through in the Grade & Export sheet. You do not have to retype it or upload anything.

If the assignment has no rubric, ClassLens will not invent one and quietly grade on it. It stops and asks you to approve a rubric first. We built that in on purpose. A grade based on criteria you never approved is not something you should have to defend at a parent conference.

Here is the workflow:

1. Write the assignment in Classroom.
2. Let Gemini draft the rubric, then edit it until it matches what you actually care about.
3. Grade the submissions against that rubric in ClassLens.
4. Read the results and release them yourself.

Google handles step two and ClassLens handles step three.

What you put in the criteria matters more than what reads them, because ClassLens grades against exactly what you wrote. I explained how I phrase rubric criteria to get at what a student actually understood in The questions are worth more than the answers.

Setting this up before your first assignment

Back-to-school week is the only time of year when this takes minutes instead of turning into one more thing on your list. Rosters are clean, nothing is overdue, and nobody is waiting on a grade.

1. Sign in with Google. ClassLens connects to Google Classroom directly. There is no separate account to create, and no student work to download and re-upload somewhere else.
2. Pick one class. Not all of them. The one you grade most often.
3. Set your grading preferences once. Strictness, feedback style, late work policy. They carry to every job after this.
4. Run your first job in Grade & Review. Everything lands in a Batch Review Dashboard, where the score and the comment sit next to the student's work. Nothing reaches a student until you release it.
5. Grade one small assignment and read every comment. A bell ringer, a lab check, an exit ticket. If the tone is off, change the strictness setting and run it again.

Step five is the one people skip. Read twenty comments closely now, while nothing is on fire, and you will know where the tool gets things wrong before October, when you will not have time to check.

Every new account gets 30 days of full access with no card, and the clock does not start at signup. It starts on your first real grading run. Setting it up this week and not grading anything until your first real assignment costs you nothing.

The grade stays yours

There are three ways to run a job, and none of them puts a grade in front of a student without you.

Draft Only writes the grades into Classroom as draft grades. You release them from Classroom on your own schedule.

Grade & Review sends everything to a Batch Review Dashboard, where you read the whole class on one screen, change what you disagree with, and click Return Checked to release them together.

Grade & Export writes the results to a Google Sheet instead, for teachers who keep their gradebook outside Classroom.

There is no fourth mode where the tool returns grades on its own. We removed that in April 2026 and it is not coming back.

That was a product decision before it was a compliance one, but the compliance case has gotten louder since. Oklahoma's Responsible Technology in Schools Act, signed in May, bars AI from being the primary basis for grading, discipline, or promotion decisions, and requires every district to adopt a written AI policy before 2027-28. More than thirty states now publish some form of K-12 AI guidance, and the ones that address grading consistently say the same thing: a human stays responsible for it.

If your district hands you an AI policy this month, that is the sentence to look for. If a tool can post grades on its own, you will spend time defending that choice. ClassLens cannot do it at all, so there is less to argue about.

What a rubric alone will not give you

Scoring a whole class at once shows you patterns you cannot see in a rubric. When a job finishes, ClassLens generates a Knowledge Gap Report that shows where students had trouble, not just who scored what. If most of the class missed the same criterion for the same reason, you know what to reteach Thursday. Scattered reasons usually point somewhere else, like a question that was worded badly, and reteaching the content will not fix that.

That is the report I use to plan the week, and I explained it in more detail in What is a Knowledge Gap Report.

FAQ

Can ClassLens use the rubric Gemini created in Classroom?

Yes. ClassLens reads the rubric attached to the Classroom assignment and scores each criterion against its point levels. You do not retype it or re-upload it.

What if my assignment has no rubric in Classroom?

ClassLens asks you to approve a rubric before it grades anything. It will not score work against criteria you have not seen.

Do students see grades before I do?

No. Draft Only writes draft grades into Classroom that you release yourself. Grade & Review holds everything in a Batch Review Dashboard until you click Return Checked. Grade & Export writes to a Sheet. No mode returns grades automatically.

Does this only work for essays?

No. ClassLens grades across what students actually turn in, including short answers, worksheets, lab reports, programming work submitted as a screenshot with console output, handwritten and photographed work, and since June 2026, audio and video. Most tools in this category handle essays only. A few formats fall outside what we read, MKV video and most raw source-code files being the common ones, and those are skipped with a clear notice rather than graded badly.

Is the free trial really 30 days?

Yes, full access, no credit card. The clock starts at your first grading run rather than at signup, so setting up in August and grading in September still gives you the full month when you need it.

What happens to student work after grading?

During a job, each submission is staged in a private Google Cloud Storage bucket in a US region and deleted as soon as grading of that file completes, with a 24-hour bucket lifecycle policy as the backstop. In Draft Only nothing is cached afterward. In Grade & Review, the drafted results sit in a short-lived review queue so you can read the work beside the draft, and that queue is deleted when you release the grades, with a 24-hour failsafe if you walk away. We do not write student names or email addresses to our database; students are referenced by opaque Google Classroom identifiers. Full detail is in our privacy policy.