Releasing is deliberately its own step, after grading, so a grade only reaches a student when you mean it to.
Review the whole class first
Before releasing, you see the class as a whole: the distribution of scores, anything that looks borderline, and anything still waiting for review. This is the moment to catch outliers and make final adjustments.
Adjust or curve
If you need to, you can adjust individual grades or apply a curve across the class before anything goes out. What students see is exactly what you release, never a work-in-progress.
What a student receives
When you release, each student gets their grade and a marked-up report PDF: their work with the rubric, the scores, and the feedback. If your class is connected to an LMS, the grade and the report are pushed back there too.
When a grade is held back
A paper the assistant could not finish reading will not release. If some criteria came back unscored, the paper shows as Incomplete, and releasing the class skips it and tells you how many were held back. The rest of the class still goes out. Open a held-back paper, score the criteria marked as not assessed, and it releases like any other.
This is deliberate. A grade missing part of your rubric has no honest overall number, so rather than sending an unfinished one it waits for you.
Undo
Released something too early? You can un-release it, which pulls it back from the student view and from your LMS, so you can fix it and release again.