The analysis of surgical motion has received a growing interest with the development of devices allowing their automatic capture. In this context, the use of advanced surgical training systems make an automated assessment of surgical trainee possible. Automatic and quantitative evaluation of surgical skills is a very important step in improving surgical patient care. In this paper, we present a novel approach for the discovery and ranking of discriminative and interpretable patterns of surgical practice from recordings of surgical motions. A pattern is defined as a series of actions or events in the kinematic data that together are distinctive of a specific gesture or skill level. Our approach is based on the discretization of the continuous kinematic data into strings which are then processed to form bags of words. This step allows us to apply discriminative pattern mining technique based on the word occurrence frequency. We show that the patterns identified by the proposed technique can be used to accurately classify individual gestures and skill levels. We also present how the patterns provide a detailed feedback on the trainee skill assessment. Experimental evaluation performed on the publicly available JIGSAWS dataset shows that the proposed approach successfully classifies gestures and skill levels. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.