Why would you plate cells at different densities in a colormetric assay?
The comments you have given are some reasons, although they also depend on the confluency of the cells. Your teacher/professor/advisor is also making sure that you can see an effect at low levels of drug, as well as making sure that changes in the signal are visible - for example, does a 50% reduction in viability due to drug activity give the same drop in signal as reducing the number of cells by 50%? You don't say what kind of assay you're running, but a fairly common and inexpensive one is the MTT assay, with some kits nowadays switching to XTT for greater sensitivity and a reduction in the number of steps in the assay (example kit from Cell Signaling compared to an MTT assay kit from ThermoFisher), as the final colorimetric product does not require solubilization before reading. Finally, depending on the lab you're in, the conditions for the assay may not have been optimized yet, so your instructor wants you to test a couple of different densities to see what works best.