Google Assignments is a new tool that helps in collecting and grading student work

Today, Google LLC introduced Google Assignments, a new tool that will help the creation, organization, and grading of coursework for students. Assignments will be available for free as part of G Suite for Education and can be used by instructors alongside or integrated with a Learning Management System (LMS). The official blog wrote:

It [Google Assignments] helps you save time with streamlined assignment workflows, ensure student work is authentic with originality reports, and give constructive feedback with comment banks.

Integrated within Assignments is a feature that will help instructors check submitted assignments and essays for missed citations and plagiarism against billions of pages and books indexed by Google. Enabling this feature for a particular assignment will also allow students to assess the originality of their work a limited number of times (three times to be exact) before turning it in. After submission, an originality report will be generated for instructors that will flag missed citations and highlight text that has a high similarity index with text on the web or in books.

Moreover, with Assignment's inbuilt integration with Google Docs, instructors will now be able to directly comment and leave suggestions on the coursework that is turned in by the student.

Furthermore, students and instructors alike will have the option to attach a file in any format to the coursework. From Word documents to spreadsheets, slides, digital portfolios, and Colab notebooks.

Starting today, users can sign up for the beta program for Google Assignments here. As noted before, Assignments can be used as a standalone application as a complement to the LMS or the school's administration can integrate the app directly with the LMS whereby options like roster syncing and grade transmission to the LMS notebook will be enabled. For users who are already using Google Classroom, Assignments will already be 'baked' in. However, they will see a new feature that will help generate originality/plagiarism reports.

You can explore the full feature set of Google Assignments here.