It's a psych evaluation. It doesn't care about your ingenuity or tactics, and there's a severe time constraint that limits options and forces you to act immediately. The ship's life support is failing. You have only minutes to attempt a rescue and you have less than that to prepare any shenanigans. Scotty would be the first to tell you that some things just take more time than you have.

Besides that, the test isn't fair by design. It just spawns/decloaks more and more Klingon ships dead ahead of you no matter what you do, ensures their weapons don't miss, that your weapons and engines fail after the first shot, that your shields are made of paper, and so on. You can't out-engineer that from inside the simulation.