According to Novak, the Senior Gift campaign misleads students into thinking that their contribution goes toward a specific program or campus improvement.

The class gift is "a drop in the bucket for Harvard," Novak said, since the University regularly receives donations hundreds of times larger.

" I think it's misleading to tell seniors that their money makes a meaningful impact," he said.

The Senior Gift has ranged from $23,573 to $68,036 in the last few years. The Class of 1999, 60 percent of whom donated to the campaign, broke recent records for donations and participation.

According to ASG's website, however, $10,000 of the Class of 1999 campaign came from a single donor, and the average amount raised annually by the Senior Gift in the past decade has been a mere $37,600.

Novak also said that the Student Gift Fund spends a large amount of money on processing gifts and rewarding its donors. The ASG website says that open bar banquets for volunteers, prizes for House competitions, advertising and processing are some of the larger costs of the Senior Gift campaign-- costs that annually amount to thousands of dollars.

"In fact, if one tallies the expenses of the Senior Gift campaign, the already small impact of the donations of the senior class becomes yet tinier and possibly negative," the website says.