Active and Passive Voice: Tense-Wise Rules with Examples

Voice in English grammar refers to whether the subject of a sentence performs the action or receives it. Every sentence with a transitive verb operates in one of two voices: active or passive.

This distinction matters in placement aptitude tests because voice-conversion questions appear in the verbal ability section of TCS NQT, AMCAT, CoCubes, and most company-specific assessments. It also surfaces indirectly in sentence-correction items, where an awkward passive construction is the error you’re expected to spot. The rules are mechanical once you learn the tense-wise patterns.

What Voice Means in English Grammar

Voice indicates the relationship between the subject and the verb’s action:

• Active voice: The subject does the action. The sentence moves from actor to action to receiver.
• Passive voice: The subject receives the action. The sentence moves from receiver to action, with the actor optionally mentioned in a by-phrase.

The choice between active and passive is not a question of correctness. Both are grammatically valid. The choice depends on what you want to emphasise: the doer or the result.

A quick identification test: if the sentence answers “who did it?” with the grammatical subject, it’s active. If the subject answers “what was done to it?”, it’s passive.

Active Voice: Structure and Examples

The active-voice formula across all tenses follows one pattern:

Subject + Verb (conjugated for tense) + Object

Tense-wise active-voice examples

• Simple present: The team submits the report every Monday.
• Simple past: The team submitted the report on Friday.
• Simple future: The team will submit the report tomorrow.
• Present continuous: The team is submitting the report right now.
• Past continuous: The team was submitting the report when the server crashed.
• Present perfect: The team has submitted the report already.
• Past perfect: The team had submitted the report before the deadline.
• Future perfect: The team will have submitted the report by noon.

Notice that the subject (“the team”) stays in the actor position across every tense. Only the auxiliary and verb form change.

Passive Voice: Structure and Examples

The passive-voice formula:

Object (as new subject) + form of "be" (matching tense) + past participle + by + original subject (optional)

Tense-wise passive-voice examples

• Simple present: The report is submitted by the team every Monday.
• Simple past: The report was submitted by the team on Friday.
• Simple future: The report will be submitted by the team tomorrow.
• Present continuous: The report is being submitted by the team right now.
• Past continuous: The report was being submitted by the team when the server crashed.
• Present perfect: The report has been submitted by the team already.
• Past perfect: The report had been submitted by the team before the deadline.
• Future perfect: The report will have been submitted by the team by noon.

The past participle (“submitted”) stays constant across all tenses. The only component that shifts is the form of “be.”

Converting Active to Passive Across Tenses

The conversion follows three mechanical steps:

• Step 1: Move the object to the subject position.
• Step 2: Change the verb to the appropriate “be” form for the tense, followed by the past participle.
• Step 3: Place the original subject after “by” (or drop it if the doer is unimportant).

Conversion reference table

Tense	Active form	Passive form
Simple present	V1 / V1+s	is/am/are + V3
Simple past	V2	was/were + V3
Simple future	will + V1	will be + V3
Present continuous	is/am/are + V1-ing	is/am/are + being + V3
Past continuous	was/were + V1-ing	was/were + being + V3
Present perfect	has/have + V3	has/have + been + V3
Past perfect	had + V3	had + been + V3
Future perfect	will have + V3	will have + been + V3

V1 = base form, V2 = simple past form, V3 = past participle.

Worked examples

• Active: The manager reviewed the code before deployment.

• Passive: The code was reviewed by the manager before deployment.

• Tense: simple past. Verb change: “reviewed” becomes “was reviewed.”

• Active: The college has announced the placement schedule.

• Passive: The placement schedule has been announced by the college.

• Tense: present perfect. Verb change: “has announced” becomes “has been announced.”

• Active: The hiring panel will interview 40 candidates next week.

• Passive: 40 candidates will be interviewed by the hiring panel next week.

• Tense: simple future. Verb change: “will interview” becomes “will be interviewed.”

Common conversion errors students make

• Forgetting to change the pronoun case: “He” in active becomes “him” in the by-phrase, not “he.”
• Using the wrong form of “be” for the tense: “The letter is written by her yesterday” mixes present “is” with a past time marker.
• Adding “by” when the doer is obvious or irrelevant: “Rice is grown by farmers in India” is technically correct but stylistically weak. “Rice is grown in India” reads better.

When Passive Voice Is the Better Choice

Style guides recommend active voice as the default. But passive voice is the correct choice in specific situations:

• The doer is unknown: “The window was broken sometime last night.” No one knows who did it.
• The doer is irrelevant: “The exam results were published on the university portal.” Who posted them doesn’t matter; the results do.
• Formal or scientific writing: “The sample was heated to 100 degrees Celsius.” Lab reports and research papers use passive voice by convention, according to Purdue OWL.
• Avoiding blame or creating distance: “A mistake was made in the calculation.” Corporate and diplomatic language uses passive to soften accountability.

In placement-test questions, the instruction is usually to identify voice or convert between forms. Knowing when passive is preferred helps you answer sentence-correction items where the “error” is an inappropriate active construction in a formal context.

Practice Questions for Placement Tests

Use these to test your conversion speed. Placement verbal sections give roughly 30 to 45 seconds per question.

• Q1: Convert to passive: “The invigilator distributed the answer sheets.”

• Answer: The answer sheets were distributed by the invigilator.

• Q2: Convert to active: “The project proposal has been approved by the HOD.”

• Answer: The HOD has approved the project proposal.

• Q3: Identify the voice: “A new library is being constructed on campus.”

• Answer: Passive voice (present continuous passive).

• Q4: Convert to passive: “The placement cell will release the shortlist by Friday.”

• Answer: The shortlist will be released by the placement cell by Friday.

• Q5: Convert to active: “The server had been restarted by the IT team before users noticed the outage.”

• Answer: The IT team had restarted the server before users noticed the outage.

These five cover simple past, present perfect, present continuous, simple future, and past perfect. That range matches the tense distribution in most placement verbal sections.

Voice in Sentence-Correction Questions

Voice errors also appear in sentence-correction items, where you’re not asked to convert but to spot the problem. Common patterns include:

• Tense mismatch in passive: “The application is reviewed by the panel yesterday.” The present “is” clashes with the past time adverb.
• Missing auxiliary in passive: “The document signed by the dean.” This reads as a noun phrase, not a sentence. It needs “was signed.”
• Dangling passive: “Seen from the top floor, the manager pointed at the construction site.” The passive participle “seen” attaches to “the manager,” creating an illogical meaning.

Recognising these patterns quickly in the 30-second-per-question window is what separates prepared candidates from guessers. The underlying skill is the same: identify the subject, check whether the verb form matches the voice and tense implied by context.

For a full breakdown of tense-related errors in sentence-correction questions, see the verb tense-sequence guide. For the broader verbal ability preparation roadmap, start with the verbal ability placement prep guide. Both cover the grammatical foundations that make voice-conversion questions straightforward once the rules are internalised.

The same subject-verb-object parsing that makes voice conversion mechanical is what NLP models do at a tokeniser level. If you’ve found the rule-based grammar in this article interesting, TinkerLLM lets you see how language models handle these transformations at scale. At ₹299 for the launch cohort, it’s a low-cost way to explore how grammar rules map to the computational structures behind tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. The by-phrase you spent time mastering in passive-voice conversion? That’s an agent-role identification task that transformers learn from millions of such sentence pairs.

The Cambridge Grammar guide on passive voice provides additional worked examples and edge cases for students who want to go deeper than what placement tests require.