In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.

Example input: [163, 290, 90, 51, 96, 86, 282, 265, 10, 85, 91, 201, 68, 126, 26, 228, 229, 236, 31, 71], k=14
Example output: 201
Example explanation: 201 is the 14th smallest element in the input list.
Q: [292, 116, 83, 47, 68, 195, 133, 182, 231, 154, 128, 184, 263, 284, 22, 66, 127, 72, 228, 98], k=17
A:
231