Consider a random polynomial G Q (x) = ξ Q,n x n + ξ Q,n−1 x n−1 + · · · + ξ Q,0 with independent coefficients uniformly distributed on 2Q + 1 integer points {−Q, . . . , Q}. Denote by D(G Q ) the discriminant of G Q . We show that there exists a constant Cn, depending on n only such that for all Q ≥ 2 the distribution of D(G Q ) can be approximated as followswhere ϕn denotes the distribution function of the discriminant of a random polynomial of degree n with independent coefficients which are uniformly distributed on [−1, 1]. Let ∆(G Q ) denote the minimal distance between the complex roots of G Q . As an application we show that for any ε > 0 there exists a constant δn > 0 such that ∆(G Q ) is stochastically bounded from below/above for all sufficiently large Q in the following sense P δn < ∆(G Q ) < 1 δn > 1 − ε.