When I went to college the first time it was for liberal arts. I also participated in Mock Trial, which is a sort of performative pre-law competition where two teams compete as Prosecution/​Plaintiff and Defense on in a fictional case. Points are awarded by judges based on individual performance of team members and then the total determines the winner.
Since there is an established set of (fictional) facts, and we use a simplified version of the rules of evidence, it is a kind of boundedly-extemporaneous speaking. I was good at this, and in a good program; I occasionally won tournament awards and we competed at the national championships. This trains the physical skills well, in the main through frequent practice. They were also disproportionately rewarded. The judges were volunteers; clear exposition that did not require them to think too hard routinely shifted the evidence in your favor. It trained cognitive skills reasonably well, because even though the rules were simplified and known to everyone it was adversarial so there was continuous testing of your ability to respond on your feet to what the opponent said.
This format has a better system of feedback than any other speaking competition I know of: a tournament will usually have three or four trials in it, and the case stays the same throughout the season. As a consequence you get to repeatedly test your rhetorical skill with small variations and very fast feedback. This is distinct from oratory or debate competitions, where it is common to only speak once per competition. For anyone who is still an undergraduate, I recommend it.
When I went to college the first time it was for liberal arts. I also participated in Mock Trial, which is a sort of performative pre-law competition where two teams compete as Prosecution/​Plaintiff and Defense on in a fictional case. Points are awarded by judges based on individual performance of team members and then the total determines the winner.
Since there is an established set of (fictional) facts, and we use a simplified version of the rules of evidence, it is a kind of boundedly-extemporaneous speaking. I was good at this, and in a good program; I occasionally won tournament awards and we competed at the national championships. This trains the physical skills well, in the main through frequent practice. They were also disproportionately rewarded. The judges were volunteers; clear exposition that did not require them to think too hard routinely shifted the evidence in your favor. It trained cognitive skills reasonably well, because even though the rules were simplified and known to everyone it was adversarial so there was continuous testing of your ability to respond on your feet to what the opponent said.
This format has a better system of feedback than any other speaking competition I know of: a tournament will usually have three or four trials in it, and the case stays the same throughout the season. As a consequence you get to repeatedly test your rhetorical skill with small variations and very fast feedback. This is distinct from oratory or debate competitions, where it is common to only speak once per competition. For anyone who is still an undergraduate, I recommend it.