Q: 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.
[227, 108, 115, 232, 297, 144, 267, 88, 244, 91, 68, 114, 248, 180, 173, 219, 257, 66, 236, 197], k=17
A:
248