Best Way to Store Varchar(MAX)

Question

I’m working on an EAD project where I work.

There will be simulations with many questions and their respective answers. These questions and some answers are usually quite large and I am storing them as VARCHAR(MAX) in an SQL Server database.

The table of simulations_questions has the following structure:

Cod int
Cod_simulado int
Pergunta varchar(max)
Comentario_Resposta varchar(max)
Pontos tinyint

The answer table is the same structure, the difference is that instead of Cod_simulated it is Cod_question.

However, in this database that I am working on, it has other non-standard tables that already have more than 20 thousand questions and to load this table takes a long time (around 30 seconds) because the inserted text values are large.

For a while, they decided to create several tables of the type Curso_x_questions and Curso_x_answers where "X" is the code of the course in the table courses to optimize the loading time of the questions and their respective answers. It worked well, but this would be the best and most correct way possible?

I am in doubt in which alternative to use, because in the long term I do not know what action I should take to optimize the future querys that will be executed, except by indexes. As there are thousands of accesses when the simulated ones are released, it will cause a great load in the table when we seek the questions and answers which can generate a lot of slowness in the site.