AnKing is an incredible resource. Tens of thousands of cards, tagged by resource, maintained by a community. If you are in medical school and not using it, you are working harder than you need to.
But AnKing was not made from your professor's slides. It was made from First Aid, Pathoma, Sketchy, and Boards and Beyond. Your in-house exams are written from your lectures. The overlap is large but it is not complete, and the non-overlapping part is exactly where students lose points they should not lose.
The gap is real and measurable
Every school has its pet topics: the professor's research area that gets three lecture slides and two exam questions, the local treatment protocol that differs from the textbook, the anatomy detail that only your school's practical tests. None of that is in AnKing, because AnKing cannot be in 150 schools' lectures at once.
The symptom is familiar: you mature 80% of the relevant AnKing cards, feel prepared, then sit the exam and hit a question about something you have never seen. It was in lecture 14. It was never in your deck.
How to find your gaps manually
Pick one recent lecture and do a coverage check. Open the slides and the Anki browser side by side. For each slide, search your collection for the key terms. You will find three outcomes: covered well, covered partially (a card exists but misses the detail the professor emphasized), and not covered at all.
Do this for two or three lectures and a pattern emerges. Most students find that 10 to 20 percent of tested lecture material has no card. That is not a small number when exams are curved.
Adding lecture-specific cards without breaking AnKing
The standard advice is to make your own cards for the gaps and keep them in a separate deck, or tag them clearly so they do not pollute AnKing's tagging system. Both work. The separate-deck approach keeps updates clean: when AnKing releases a new version, your lecture cards are untouched.
The harder part is the partial-coverage case. When AnKing has a card on the topic but your professor emphasized a different detail or a different cutoff, you need to know that before exam day. This is a comparison problem: your deck versus your slides, fact by fact.
The fast way: let the comparison run itself
SlideToAnki's deck improvement does this comparison automatically. Upload your AnKing-based .apkg (or any existing deck) alongside your lecture slides, and it identifies the material in the slides your deck does not cover, then proposes new cards for exactly those gaps. It also flags existing cards that the slides contradict or supersede. You review every proposal with accept, reject, or edit, and each card links back to its source slide.
You keep AnKing for what it is great at — the foundational board material — and you get lecture-specific coverage for what it was never designed to do. No manual slide-by-slide diff, no weekend lost to the Anki browser.
The bottom line
Premade decks are a starting point, not a complete study plan. The students who score highest are not the ones with the most matured cards. They are the ones whose cards match what is actually going to be on the test. Close the gap between AnKing and your lectures and you stop donating points to material you never studied.