How would you deal with Kirk's cheating?

[Nickswitz]

Well, Spock later told Kirk, "the only way to win is to cheat" or something similar in the cave scene, as Spock going back in time, was in essence, cheating...

[Mikey]

Like I said, it turns on what you call "cheating". You can argue that nothing a person can do in reality is really a cheat. But Kirk often won through tricks and unconventional means, and I bet it sure felt like cheating to the people he beat that way.

You're right, there is the issue of definition. I think the key point is that to be analagous to what he did on the KM test, in a RL situation he would have had to alter the universe - not just find an unconventional method of problem-solving.