The sarcasm (and the :dubious: )in my response should’ve been directed at those who would call reading the questions beforehand “cheating”, not at you. If it seemed like I was saying your question was stupid, I apologize.
That said, I think the main point of my post still stands. I can’t see how it would be a bad idea to know what one is looking for before one starts looking for it. In the worst-case scenario, a person with severly limited reading comprehension, the person would be equally unable to discern the answers, but at least he would know which answers he wasn’t finding. And if one of the questions was based on a specific phrase rather than an abstract concept, that person could answer that question correctly, provided he was armed with the knowledge that he should search out that phrase. Leaving it to recollection would be unlikely to produce the same results.
That said, an argument could be made (although I’m not going to make it, because I don’t agree with the premise) that reading the questions beforehand undermines the goal of testing actual reading comprehension, rather than the ability to find answers to specific questions. But if we assume that the goal is simply to do well on the test, reading the questions beforehand can only be either helpful or irrelevant.
Likewise, if my response was interpreted as smarmy or sarcastic I apologise, because it certainly wasn’t intended that way.
In fact I just re-read all the responses, and all I could see was support for the OP’s position.
More clarification: actually now I see what you mean - my response was only directed to the original question, not your (aaslatten’s) follow-up. I can see that if it were interpreted to be the latter it may appear dismissive. I certainly apologise for that. I didn’t address aaslatten’s perfectly reasonable question because I have no expertise in the matter. Fortunately other more qualified posters were able to offer their experience.
It does depend a bit on the test–I don’t think that reading ahead is nearly as useful on the AP test (what I teach) because so often the real question is either in the answer choices (i.e. With which of the following statements would the author of this piece most likely agree? . . ."), or the passage is so convoluted that there is no way you are going to remember what to look for: AP questions skip around the passage, and if the first question is “Which of the following literary devices is NOT present in lines 84-92?”, by the time you read the rest of the questions and then the passage and get to line 92, you aren’t going to remember what to look for–especially ocnsidering that the passage is likely incredibly convoluted.
I teach my kids to skim the passage and get a general view of what it is about, and to then read the questions and go back to look at the passage as needed. Time being so, so critical on the AP test, I think that reading all the questions before reading the text is a misuse of that time.