Hi @rgbatduke,

I think this can actually be done in assignments, you just may have been looking at the wrong option.  When setting up the assignment, you can set the "Display Grade as" option to "Not Graded", which will then create the assignment without adding anything to your gradebook.  I'm pretty sure this is what you're looking for, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

One other thing I wanted to quickly mention about the assignments page is that even though you as the teacher will always see things displayed under the assignment groups, the default view for students is to show things by date in auto-generated groups such as "past assignments," "overdue assignments," "undated assignments," etc...  Students can switch to the "show by type" view to get the assignment groups view you have as a teacher, but I don't know how many will do that.  You can check this out by using the "student view" button on the assignments page if you'd like.  Just wanted to make sure you were aware of this so you don't rely too much on the assignment group design purely for organizational purposes.

-Chris